March Recipe: Stout-Battered Cod

Another month, another recipe to try new things with food.

It started out when cod went on sale at our local grocery store. We like fish, but fish trends toward expensive, so we especially like sale fish. At first, I was just going to bread it and pan fry it, but then I couldn’t find the bread crumbs in the store — and no, did not want to make my own. Then I thought, “Hey! Flour + beer = beer battered cod!” Which seemed eminently doable as they’ve not yet made the grocery store where I can’t find the beer.

In the beer section — because my grocery store is too cool to limit its beer to a single aisle — I bought stout, purely on whim. And also because it was on sale.

(Do you sense a theme in my grocery purchases yet?)

Then I got to listen to the competing voices in my head for the next day or so:

“OMG, you’re really going to make something fried? How can you go and ruin a perfectly healthy meal like fish like that?”

“OMG, beer battered cod!”

“Dude–” because the voices in my head call me dude — “can you even make beer batter with stout?”

The answer to the last one at least is a resounding, “Yes!” Though the recipe requires some additions to a standard beer batter. What I used is as follows:

Dietary Note: This recipe contains meat (fish), eggs, and wheat gluten. Unfortunately, I’m not sure how substituting any of those ingredients would affect the overall recipe, so I can’t make recommendations there. If, however, you try it with a substitution, I’d be interested in hearing what you did and how it went.

Stout-Battered Cod

1-2 lbs. cod — I made this recipe with 1lb. but discovered that the amount of batter could easily coat closer to 2lbs.
1 cup flour
1 egg
1 bottle good stout
1 tbsp. garlic powder
1 tbsp. onion powder
1/2-1 tsp. salt
few shakes black pepper
few good shakes of a nice hot sauce — e.g., Tabasco, Frank’s, Tapatio (I used Tapatio)
cooking oil

1. I started by cutting the cod across the width of the fillet into strips about as wide as my 2 fingers. The upshot is that I ended up with pieces between fish nuggets and fish sticks. It sounds funny, but I actually found this size very helpful — both for easy flipping and for making sure the fish was cooked through by the time the batter was crispified.
2. Then I combined the flour, egg, and 1 cup of the stout in a bowl. When I make a beer batter, I’m looking for something slightly thinner than pancake batter, but not much. It should be thin enough to coat the fish but thick enough to stick to it. If the batter looks too thick as is — mine was — add more beer little by little. If the batter looks thin enough, drink the rest of the beer.
3. After I have the consistency I want, I start adding spices. I added the solid spices in the quantities described and added the hot sauce after that, a few shakes at a time until I got the tanginess I wanted. It is possible that I used several more than a “few shakes,” all told.
4. I heated a large skillet with vertical sides on high, adding about 1/4 inch of cooking oil along the bottom. I coated each cod piece (pun intended) in the batter and set it in the oil, cooking 2-3 minutes on a side. In retrospect, I probably should have dried off the cod before coating it in the batter; I had some pieces where the beer batter sort of slipped off. It was still crispy and crunchy and tasty; it just wasn’t in the right spot.
5. When each piece was done, I laid it on a plate lined with paper plates (we were out of paper towels) to drain a bit. Then serve.

Observations we noticed as we were eating:

1. That thing about drying the cod.
2. Stout batter is perhaps more flavorful than is standard beer better. There’s a sweetness-savoriness-spiciness combo in this, which is fabulous but serious food.
3. Also that thing about more batter than fish. I ended up making hush puppies out of the rest — which, along with the fish, turned out to be too much heavy, fried food all at once for our tastes. We ended up serving the fish with sides of hush puppies and wilted kale and arugula. Next time, we decided, we might do just the fish and a fresh green salad.
4. Finally, we were in sore want of some malt vinegar. That we did not have any was the greatest tragedy of the evening.