The Best Fish Tacos

This is one of our new favorite meals. Ever since Mexico I've been craving the delicious fish tacos we had there. Well, with a little tweaking of a recipe I found, we found a close runner up.


The fixins - which you can prepare well ahead of time and keep in the fridge
1) Make some homemade Pico. I take the seeds out of my tomatoes first so the end product isn't runny and then dice up tomatoes, yellow onion, cilantro, and a bit of jalapeno. Then toss that all together with some fresh lime juice, salt, and pepper until I like the flavor.
2) Make simple guacamole. Mine is simply smashed avocados, lime juice, salt and pepper. Delish!
3) Shred some cabbage
4) Cut a few limes into wedges (approx a wedge per taco)

The fish
1) Chose your fish. I use tillapia because it is fairly inexpensive, yet tasty. I buy the frozen stuff and thaw out one fillet of fish per person eating. Thaw it simply by leaving it in it's pre-packaged plastic and sticking it in your sink with hot water. They thaw quick.
2) Once fish is thawed, cut into pieces, I like mine cut into fairly small pieces so that they can fit in the corn tortillas easily.

The Batter
1) Mix together about 1 1/2 cups flour, 1/4 cup cornstarch, 2 Tbsp baking powder, and 1 tsp salt. You can change the proportions of these ingredients quite a lot and it will still work out just fine.
2) In a separate bowl mix together 1 egg and 8 oz of beer, apple beer (it's all I had once and it turned out delicious), o'douls, or something else with sugar and carbonation if you want to be creative.
3) Combine the flour and beer mixtures. You may need to add more flour or more beer depending on thickness of batter. You want it to be like pancake batter.

Frying the fish
1) Heat about 4 inches of canola or veggie oil in a heavy pot on your stove top. Keep the heat around medium or a notch above, you don't want it to get too hot so that it burns your batter, but it does need to be quite hot.
2) Rinse fish, dip in a bowl of plain flour, and then put into batter.
3) Once oil is ready, put battered pieces of fish into oil (depending on size of pot and amount of fish, you may have to do more than one batch of cooking), turn them every once in a while and cook until the batter is nicely browned (about 7 or 8 minutes). Remove the pieces of cooked fish and place on a plate covered in a paper towel to soak up some of the grease.

The tortillas
1) Heat a bit of oil in a frying pan on stove top (you can use some of the oil you fried your fish in if you want)
2) Place corn tortilla(s) in the oil and cook until slightly browned on one side, flip and brown the other side.
3) Remove from oil, place on a plate covered in a paper towel, and bend in half to make a taco shell shape.

ENJOY!
Assemble the tacos how you want. I find that usually 2 or 3 pieces of fish fit in each taco shell. Of course pico and avocado are typical taco condiments, however do try the cabbage, it really does add a good texture and flavor to the taco. Squeeze a lime over your fillings. Eric likes to add some tarter sauce to the top of his, I think it takes over the flavor too much so I leave it off.