Monday, July 20, 2009

Smoked Catfish Tomato Stacks

I did this dish for the Addicted To BBQ forum Summer of 09 Iron Chef contest. Obviously a key part of a cooking contest is missing in this due to it being judged solely by viewing the pictures of the cooks and not being able to taste the cooks. It’s still a pretty fun thing to do and you can easily see that each contestant is serious about the contest and it brings out their creativity and their best work (most of the time). I say most of the time as my entry here is in doubt if you ask me. While it may have been an excellent cook and look decent it seems less than great which I think is what will be needed to win.

I started with Q-Babe’s recipe for smoked catfish dip / spread and combined that with the idea of a fried ripe tomato stack with the catfish spread sandwiched in the middle. The ingredients required by the contest rules were Catfish, Tomatoes, Lemon/Lime, and an optional 4th ingredient, “Boca-Burger”. I find the Boca Burger meat to be plain out nasty and revolting so I came up with a plan to have this optional ingredient to be “optional” when eating the dish. I soaked the veggie burger meat that I had cubed in Fish Sauce for several hours and then basted it with Oyster Sauce when grilling. Panko bread crumbs were used to make the best possible outer crust for the tomatoes and the dish was assembled first then fried. To make sure the catfish spread did not get hot while frying the tomatoes on each side the spread was placed in the freezer a few minutes first. The combination of Q-Babe’s Smoked Catfish Dip and the outstanding panko crust on the home grown ripe tomatoes was a good choice and whether you want to go to the trouble to prepare this the way I have here or not, you absolutely owe it to yourself to make Q-Babe’s Smoked Catfish Dip. We didn’t use it all and a couple of days went by before we took it to work and ate it with crackers for lunch. I believe the cream cheese in the dish took that long to have the full flavor of the smoked fish to take over because I could not believe how good it was and all I could think about was why didn’t we fix more than we did.

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