Fried Catfish Sandwich

Chef John Guinivere prepares this delicious dish: Fried Catfish Sandwich

I usually use mayonnaise when I’m going to toast my bread. I just like the flavor and the texture and also it sort of stuffs the juice from anything you’re going to pull up from soaking up really fast. You can do this in broiler but generally, around the pan. If you’ve got a small pan, you just need a whole butter in there and brown it. And a catfish, I almost always get the pre-seasoned catfish because it always tastes pretty good and they’ve got the seasoning down, so if it works, it works and it’s usually been seasoned for a little while so it has a flavor pretty well soaked into the fish. I almost always get an extra avocado if I need one because so often you all open a one open that’s got a big old brown bruise in there. So it’s a good idea to grab two if you only need one. And if they’re on sale, grab a hard, hard one and a medium hard one and the soft one and then you can use them over the next couple of days. Slice those up. I’ll look at my bread. I tell you what, what we just want to do is just a really nice crust. That’s what we’re after. Now, I can throw my fish in there. I like to cook the catfish pretty fast. I actually like less cooking with my fish, pretty quickly. So I usually do pre-high heat and I put the lid on. If I put the lid on, it’s sort of like a little oven so we’ve got the heat coming from down, from the top as well as from the bottom. Use some tomato slices, and some red onion. If you want you can sauté the red onions if you want a little extra caramel flavor on these. I personally love raw red onions so, see that for our vegetable medley. You can use some other fish but for the price of catfish and the facts you’re putting in your sandwich and stuff, it’s really your best option in my opinion. You can do this with salmon if you like or cod. Almost anything you use for fish and chips work. Oh, it’s going pretty fast, and even if we don’t have any oil in there, we’ll see there’s a lot of moisture that came out of it. Now, you can layer them both at the bottom and the top. If you can set them out for a while for say 10 or 15 minutes, people are going to be eating away by having something under the catfish. It will stop the juice from really getting the bread to moist. These are pretty thick pieces. We’ll do with the other thing. If you wanted to speed it up, slice the fish at an angle and that way just because it’s thinner sliced, you’ll see that these will just cook in a couple of minutes. There is just very much thickness, and we’ve got all that heat. Must take a couple of minutes, maybe a minute or two max on this side and it’ll be done by this way. Of course the thicker the fish, the longer it’s going to take. And whatever I do sea bass, they almost always come in big chunks, and the outside can get cooked too much, and the inside, so it’s really better to butterfly really thick pieces of fish. The nice thing about sea bass is that it has its own natural oils in there that make them pretty rich, so try sea bass out. Try with that with even a salmon steak. I want you to all throw these under this piece. Give that another minute and our lid. Go ahead and put some avocado on. You can make up some guacamole if you wanted to. And I have some cilantro. Cilantro goes good with the spicy catfish. Just take this off, put it on our plate, and the catfish is pretty much done. It’s easier to make. That’s the best part. Leave our onions right there. All often we get piece of fishes like these, way up temperature, frying like heck and then I got to sauté some of those so I’ll just turn it off. It will cook just right. Get our fish on there. You can see how moist it is. We’ve double onions with these ones. We have the caramelized and the fresh. Nothing’s wrong with that. And if you want, you can for your friends, if you’re having company, you could serve it like this. Open faced just because it’s going to be prettier, and there you go. There’s your catfish sandwich.