Fish Tacos with wild cod fish

[Music] this week on big red's cooking we make fish tacos [Music] hi welcome back to big red's cooking i'm big red so this week i've got a great well i think everything i do is great well actually no that's a lie trust me i make a lot of mistakes i'm going to put that out there right now yo the only the great stuff makes it to the video so this is another great thing so we're going into the fall season here now we're back into our food fishery here in newfoundland i love wild food we're in the hunting season and i'm hoping that i'm going to be able to bag a moose in the coming weeks or months depending on how long it takes and really i want to see myself do more and more dishes where it's food from the land so this is what i'm doing this week you know so growing up here in newfoundland codfish cod is king in newfoundland you know the big joke is they don't call the godfather it's the godfather there's a you know thousand one different things that get said of a cod but really cod is a staple here you know but most people you know they pan fry it with a little bit of salt pork fat or they do fish and chips they might make a cutter groton they really don't venture too much salt cod fish a few different dishes one of my favorite ways of eating it and it's really been a big trend the last few years and i'm hoping that a lot of you have actually had this before but if not here's something else you can add into your repertoire we're going to do fish tacos this evening so you know they're gonna there are some similarities but there's no crunchy shell on this one there's not no old el paso we're actually gonna be using some soft tortilla and we won't be using salsa things like that so why don't we move on over to the workbench and we can talk about it a little bit more over there all right so as always whenever i'm cooking anything i like to get me my meson plast done first and maison plastis is one of those sort of classical kitchen terms and technically i think translates to everything in its place but really it's an expression we use in kitchens to talk about all the things that we're going to need so that include that could include things like our knives spatula i've got there i've got a fork for picking up the fish afterwards i've got my fish out i've got my ingredients out all right so the next thing i want to do is i actually assemble my ingredients in ways that i'm going to need to use them to be able to put together our fish tacos so whenever we're doing food it's always nice to have sort of different textures and flavors and things like that and again with fish tacos one of the sort of classic garnishes with this is just a little bit of shaved red cabbage so let's peel away some of these older leaves here i'm just going to take my knife and just really really thinly just shave a little bit of this red cabbage and the thinner we can get this the better there we go so that's enough of that and i got some of these nice little ramekins so i'll go ahead and i'll put my red cabbage in there and that's going to give a nice texture that's going to give some nice bright color as well when i go to plate this up now again i love onion type flavors and again this is gonna another bit of a sort of a textural part but it's also gonna give us some nice flavor and i've got shallots here and again shallots are just a wonderful ingredient if you haven't cooked with them before i highly highly recommend it and they're almost like you know they remember the onion family obviously but they tend to have a much milder much sweeter flavor and when they're cooked they tend to develop a really sort of nice nutty flavor so again i'm just going to do a really nice thin julienne on these i'm going to try and get it as thin as possible and that should be more than enough for what i'm going to need i'll put those in there and we'll just put that to the side and what you'll notice is i'm starting with ingredients i can sit around you know i always like to work with the stuff that can that's safest for sitting around for the longest periods of time get those sort of out of the way and i can push them to the side all right now a fish taco wouldn't be a fish taco without a little bit of lime and what i always find is a nice way of getting extra juice making sure that we get all that juice we want out of a lime or any of our citrus fruits for that matter just give a little bit of a squeeze ahead of time so i'm just gonna now i'm actually gonna be using this lime in a couple of different ways so there's some lime for me to be able to put on my tacos themselves and put that to the side now fish tacos unlike our traditional beef tacos we tend not to use salsa and sour cream we're actually gonna make a spicy mayonnaise sauce and it's actually gonna end up being almost like a a lime and chili sauce so all we're going to do here is just add a bit of mayonnaise and i've got some my lovely homemade hot sauce now you can go ahead and use any hot sauce you want really you know and add as much or as little as you like you know you're the one that's going to eat this not me i like to give this a nice squeeze of lime juice and then this is just more about turning it into a bit of a sauce consistency we're going to add a little bit of water as well i'm just going to take that and we're just going to give this a little blend here get it nice and smooth so you can see now that's sort of a nice sauce consistency is not too thick it's not too thin and we can just put that to the side so there you go that's our condiments that we're going to need for our fish tacos so next thing we're going to do is we're going to actually make up a spice to be able to season this fish with now i like to use whole spices where possible and grind them up my mortar and pestle if you don't have a mortar and pestle that's okay you know go ahead and just use a regular grind stuff so i've got some i'm gonna go with some very sort of classic traditional mexican flavors here keep this very simple we've got some cumin seeds there and throw a little bit of chili powder into this a little bit of my ground cayenne a little bit of my dehydrated garlic and of course we're going to need a little bit of black pepper and finish it off just a little bit of salt oh i love grinding up cumin powder it just gives us such a wonderful smell and there we can see you know we've got a nice fine grind to our seasoning here now so we'll just put that to the side for a moment okay so a really important concept within kitchens and i tend to edit this out of my videos a lot but i get asked about cooking tips all the time and i think one of the most important concepts i try and get through my students and it's an acronym c-a-y-g and it stands for clean as you go you know it makes your cooking process much easier for constantly cleaning cleaning cleaning you'll notice i'm constantly wiping down my board when i'm working all right so next thing we're going to do here now is we're going to get our fish ready so this is some nice local wild cod that i purchased earlier this year and we're going to go with some sort of smaller tacos today so we don't want huge big pieces because it just becomes too hard to cook and too hard to eat so i tend to like pieces around two and a half three inches long and say maybe about a half inch thick so we can see that nice sort of piece right there so all i did was i just sliced that loin right in half and put that down in my glass bowl here that one looks pretty good so again i'm just all i'm doing now just taking that loin it's really quite thick i'm just gonna slice it right in half and now i've got that sort of nice sized piece that'll be easy to wrap up in a taco shell and that's all that's to that nothing too complicated here yet so what i'm going to do now give my hands a quick wash and i'll give a little plug for the video i did earlier this week all about hand washing techniques if you haven't watched that yet i'll link to that one for sure all right so all we're going to do now is just going to sprinkle a little bit of this seasoning right over the top of this fish all right so our fish is ready to go it's really the only thing we get left to do now is to cook this fish and they heat up our tortillas so i'm going to go ahead and get my burner turned on here and i'm even what i'm going to do is i'm going to turn on my center burner here as well because i really like heating my tortillas right on the griddle i found it's a little bit nicer now you can go ahead and heat them in the microwave if you want but there's just something about heating them on a hot dry surface that i find ends up making them so much nicer so we're going to want a fairly hot pan for this so i get this pan a few moments to heat up and while that's heating i'm going to put away a few things all right so i can feel my pans getting nice and warm here now so i'm just going to go ahead and i'm going to give this a nice little sprinkle of oil i don't want to deep fry this but i definitely want to make sure i've got enough oil in my pan so that that fish is going to cook so what we want to hear is that nice sizzle when we put our stuff in now here's a little trick yeah we've got those lovely shallots we take one or two of these and just sort of drop them in and i can hear that sizzle i know that pan is nice and hot there now and it's going to allow my fish to cook a little bit better and if our pan wasn't quite hot enough we wouldn't be getting that sizzle and then our fish is actually a little bit more likely to stick i'm just going to go ahead and you hear that nice sizzle there now it's really important not to overload a pan and one of the reasons why i love cooking in cast iron that cast iron tends to retain its heat much better because if we put too much in our pan at one time and then it gets cool we're not going to get the it's not going to cook the way we want it to cook so in the meantime i can feel that my griddle is nice and warm so i'm going to go ahead and start heating up some tortillas i've just got you know nice six inch ones here again you don't have a griddle like i do here go ahead and use a skillet you don't have an extra skillet go ahead pop them in the microwave for a moment we're not looking to brown or crisp up our tortillas at all we're just trying to heat them so just want them warm you might notice that they'll start to puff a little bit in some sometimes and that's okay but they'll get so much softer and tender when we do them this way now what i like to do is i take them when i take them off is just sort of wrapping a little bit of cloth and that tends to hold the moisture in and hold the heat in so we can do these in batches let's go ahead and start flipping some of this pod over now i'm going to turn my heat off at this point because i definitely do not want that cod fish over cooking there we go so my tortillas are all nice and heated my cod fit is finished pretty much here so we can go ahead and assemble some of these now so the assembly of these is really really you know there's not much to it i'm gonna do a whole bunch all one time i'm just going to take a little bit of our sauce drizzle that just put a little splash of that right onto our tortilla shell a little bit of our red cabbage here of course a few of our shallots now there's so many different variations on this and i'll talk about some of them when i write it up but there's a lot of other really sort of classic garnishes radishes are really popular really thinly sliced you could do your you could actually pickle onions a lot of people love guacamole or just sort of slices of avocado all right so just go ahead and a little bit of our fish right on in all right greedy and a couple of these make them a little bit bigger i'll break this last piece in half it had other plans for me that's fine [Music] and then of course get a little lime juice right on the fish itself and there we have our fish tacos we're just going to fold these up down grab them right on our plate and voila these fish tacos are just smelling absolutely wonderful i'm just getting that beautiful smell from that cumin and getting those you know getting a little that garlic coming through things like that so why don't we go ahead and try one of these oh i know chewing is just great tv for you guys but you know what it's so tasty you know we got that crunch from the the cabbage and there's that sort of earthiness in there getting those really nice sweet notes a little bit that bitterness from the uh the shallots themselves some spiciness some saltiness from our seasoning the cot itself is really sort of sweet a little bit of sweet undertone from the tortillas themselves and again all brought together with that lime juice to give us that acid it really has that full flavor punch and we're hitting pretty much all those notes that we're looking for when we're eating so you can see this was a really simple thing to do these work great as an appetizer go ahead and have a salad with this or some french fries and all of a sudden you get yourself a great meal so something really simple really easy you can add into it's a way of using up some of that cod fish you've got there maybe you want to try something a little bit different and you never know any of you who have kids out there trying to have you're having some issues getting them to eat their cod fish this might do it for them because they get to play with their hands so as always i really hope you did enjoy this video i really like making these things you know if you did enjoy it i'm going to ask you as always hit like i'm going to ask you as always to subscribe i know some of you guys are subscribers but there are definitely people who are watching you haven't subscribed yet so hit that subscribe button down below for me please share this on your social media feeds keep an eye on my instagram to find out what's going on at big red's cooking keep checking out my website bigredscooking.ca keep tuning back and keep making yourself some great food i hope to see you again soon bye for now [Music] you

Channel: Big Red's Cooking

Views: 2,453

Rating: 5 out of 5

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Id: zuz4nUONN08

Length: 19min 17sec (1157 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 25 2020