Fried Cod with Blue Cheese Sauce

Name: Fried Cod with Blue Cheese Cream Sauce Recipe
Prep time: 30 min
Cook time: 30 min
Total time: 1 h
Cuisine: European
Ingredients: Cod (1 kg) 1; Sea salt, black peppercorns, coriander seeds in equal parts, to taste; Allspice 1-2 berries; Flour for dredging; Vegetable oil 3-4 tbsp; Blue cheese 50 g; Cream (15%) 150 ml; Salt, ground black pepper, nutmeg to taste; Lettuce leaves, parsley, tomatoes for garnish

☆ Rate it

60 mins

You’d think nothing could be simpler than fried cod: a frying pan, vegetable oil, fish. But more often than not, frying fish is exactly what causes the most trouble. Still, this dish is very easy to make, and the blue cheese sauce gives the fish a refined flavor.

It reminds me of the children’s story “Mishka’s Porridge” by Nikolay Nosov. Haven’t read it? Do read it. It’s wonderfully vivid on how not to fry fish!

Cookbooks all over the world have plenty of fried fish recipes, and even though they look alike and use almost the same ingredients, the fried fish turns out very different. You can fry any fish. Still, some kinds are much tastier steamed, baked or grilled, for example fish kebabs. Since all the seas where we live are freshwater, we often cook so-called “river fish”. Or rather, when I catch it myself or friends bring it. Usually it’s pike perch or catfish. Pike less often, and we stuff it or stew it with vegetables. When the fish aren’t biting, we cook sea fish, buying it fresh-frozen.

The family prefers mackerel, sea bass or fried flounder. Lately we buy pollock or cod quite often. Cod is an interesting fish anyway. I remember from childhood my grandmother often stewing cod with onions and carrots. She put everything into a clay pot and set it in the heated stove.

Cod (Atlantic cod) is a fairly large fish. The body can be over a meter and a half long, although in stores you usually find carcasses about 50 cm long. Cod is a northern, Atlantic fish. Besides the tasty flesh, fishermen get tasty liver from cod, rich in vitamins and healthy fish oil. Cod liver sandwiches, perhaps, are one of the tastiest appetizers.

Just laying fillets in a pan isn’t enough to get tasty fish. First, you need to pick the spices. Second, you need breading, otherwise the fried cod will turn to mush.

On top of that, fried cod is a rather “dry” dish, and a good, tasty sauce is practically indispensable here. Sometimes we fry fish and serve it with classic pesto sauce, or a pesto-like sauce based on basil, olive oil and Parmesan.

More with white fish

Fried Pollock

30 min

Braised Hake with Onion and White Wine

1 h 30 min

Pike or Cod Meatballs in Tomato Sauce

More white fish recipes

Ingredients

2 servings

For the fish
Cod (1 kg) 1
Sea salt, black peppercorns, coriander seeds in equal parts, to taste
Allspice 1-2 berries
Flour for dredging
Vegetable oil 3-4 tbsp
For the sauce
Blue cheese 50 g
Cream (15%) 150 ml
Salt, ground black pepper, nutmeg to taste
For serving
Lettuce leaves, parsley, tomatoes for garnish

Step-by-step recipe

Turn on cook modeKeeps your screen from turning off while the recipe is open

How to prepare the cod

Thaw the cod carcass before cooking. It’s better not to rush this by putting the fish in warm water or thawing it in the microwave. It’s enough to move the carcass from the freezer to the refrigerator the day before cooking. The fish thaws perfectly and doesn’t leak, and the dish will be juicy.
Carefully cut the cod fillets off with a sharp knife. Cut off the skin too. Carefully remove all the bones. Cod has few bones, but near the fin there are lots of tiny remnants of the fin “rays”. They need to be cut out. It’s also worth running a finger along the edge of the fillet where the fin was. The bones stick out and are easy to feel. Cut the cleaned cod fillet into pieces the size of a matchbox.
Prepare a spice mix and sprinkle it over the fillets. We always make our spice mixes ourselves rather than using ready-made blends. To make the fried fish fragrant and tasty, we prepared a mix of equal parts sea salt, black (multicolored) peppercorns, coriander seeds and 1-2 allspice berries. Grind everything to a powder in a mortar and sprinkle the mix to taste over the cod fillets laid out on a plate. Leave the fillets for 15 minutes while the cheese sauce is cooking.

How to make the cheese sauce

This is perhaps one of the simplest sauces for fish and chicken. Just two ingredients: cream and blue cheese. And spices, of course. I once described a “chicken in cheese sauce” recipe with the same sauce.
As is well known, some cheeses require mold of the Penicillium genus in their production. The best-known varieties are Roquefort and Gorgonzola. The whole body of these cheeses is shot through with blue-green threads of mold, which in places forms large patches.
In a saucepan over medium heat, warm 150 ml of fresh medium-fat cream. A milk fat content of 15% is enough. As soon as the cream is hot but not yet boiling, add a pinch of salt and ground black pepper, and a pinch of ground nutmeg. Season everything to taste.
Crumble or cut 50 g of blue cheese into small cubes and drop it into the cream as it comes to a boil. Turn the heat under the pan down to the minimum. I recommend stirring with a wooden spatula, and ideally continuously. In no more than 3-4 minutes the cheese pieces will almost dissolve in the cream.
As soon as the sauce starts to boil, take it off the heat and pour it into a deep ceramic bowl.

How to fry cod in a pan

Dredge the cod fillets in flour and fry in a pan over high heat in hot vegetable oil (3-4 tbsp) until a golden crust forms.
Then cover the pan with a lid and, turning the heat down to low, fry until done: the fillet should flake easily with a fork. Cod takes about 20 minutes.

Serving

Put the fried fillets on a plate and pour the cheese sauce over them.
If you want not just tasty fish but tasty and beautifully served fish, I suggest laying the pieces of fried cod on green lettuce leaves and garnishing the dish with parsley and tomatoes. The fried cod will look great.

Calories and macros

860 kcal

Serving ≈ 470 g

Protein97 g46% of kcal
Fat49 g53% of kcal
Carbs3 g2% of kcal

100 g183 kcalProtein 20.6 gFat 10.5 gCarbs 0.7 g

Calculated from the recipe ingredients, excluding salt and spices. Data: USDA and Matvaretabellen.

Enjoyed the recipe? Pick me as a preferred source on Google, and you'll see my recipes more often in search. Choose on Google →

How did you like this recipe?

Thanks for rating!