Livin' the Good Life!: a Wisconsin Bluegill and Pumpkinseed Fry
Here's how to cook up one of my favorite dishes: Fresh Pumpkinseeds and Bluegills!
Bluegills caught in May 2020. One doesn’t need a fancy boat or fancy gear to pursue this yummy and hard-fighting fish!
First a quick note...for this recipe, the Pumpkinseed is a sunfish similar to a Bluegill, not the seeds from a pumpkin. A classic Wisconsin Fish Fry includes the fish, potato pancakes with applesauce, perhaps some coleslaw, and a beer. There are many fish fry recipes, I don't claim this is the definitive way to do it, but this is the way we've always done it and it's my favorite way. Tough to beat a fresh sunfish fry for dinner. The perfect way to do it is to catch the fish, bring them home, clean them, fry them, then serve them right away to a happy party of folks sitting at an outside table on a sunny evening.
STEP 1: Catch some panfish: Bluegills, Pumpkinseeds, maybe a couple Rock Bass. These fish are abundant where I live in Wisconsin, and can be caught through the ice in Winter, or on their beds shallow in Spring, or spread around the lake in Summer and Fall. When the Lilacs bloom, Bluegill fishing heats up, and that's when my kids and I caught the 11 Bluegills cooked up here, with worm and bobber near shore in 3-5 feet of water.
Fresh caught Wisconsin Pumpkinseed. Pound for pound, Bluegills and Pumpkinseeds are great fighting fish. They are so much fun to catch on a flyrod, and easy to catch with the kids with worm and bobber.
STEP 2: Clean, fillet, and skin the fish
- Start with a sharp fillet knife
- Chop of the head. (On the big ones make sure to keep the meat over the head, so don't just chop of the head in a straight line)
- With the head off, pull out the guts with your finger from the body cavity
- Rinse it all out with cold water
- Carefully fillet the meat off each side of the fish, this takes practice
- With the skin facing down on the cutting board, run the fillet knife back and forth right up against the skin to remove the skin with no meat left behind.
- Rinse off the boneless fillet and keep refrigerated until ready to cook. If you're not going to cook them for a long time, you could freeze them. I cooked these the same day as we caught them.
These were decent size little guys, but on panfish of this size, the meat on the outside of the rib cage is often too thin to be able to fillet off as seen above.
A nice sunfish fillet, including the meat from on the rib cage.
Fresh Bluegill and Pumpkinseed fillets, ready for breading and frying.
STEP 3: Gather up the breading ingredients in large broad bowls. Milk or buttermilk (if you use buttermilk it should be the fresh milky kind not the thick cultured buttermilk), flour, eggs, breading, and vegetable oil for frying
Ingredients for a fresh panfish fry. Milk( or fresh noncultured butter milk) , flour, eggs, breading, and pan with hot oil. This being the Dairy State of Wisconsin....we had made butter the day before and had some fresh buttermilk handy.
STEP 4: Put all the fillets into the milk
STEP 5: One by one, pull a fillet out of the milk, dredge it through the flour, coating both sides, then dip it in the beat eggs, raise it out of the eggs and let the egg drip off, then put it into the breading bowl and coat all sides with breading. I use plain panko breadcrumbs. Repeat the process for all the fillets.
STEP 5: One by one, pull a fillet out of the milk, dredge it through the flour, coating both sides, then dip it in the beat eggs, raise it out of the eggs and let the egg drip off, then put it into the breading bowl and coat all sides with breading. I use plain panko breadcrumbs. Repeat the process for all the fillets.
A fillet soaked in milk, and coated in flour.
After the flour, the fillet gets a light coat of egg. I keep all these layers as thin as possible. Light coat of flour , light coat of egg, and light coat of breading.
Ready for the fryer! Breaded sunfish fillets.
STEP 6: Heat up the vegetable oil. I use about 1.25" of oil in a deep pan. You don't want the fillets to touch the bottom of the pan. Not to hot not too cold. I have never taken the temperature, but the oil should pop and bubble , but not too much, when you lay the fish in. If it's too hot, you will burn the breading by the time the fish is cooked. I put my stove top on setting 6 (9 is the max). The oil will cool as the fillets are laid into it, so monitor and manage the temp. Careful laying the fillets into the oil, it is obviously hot and it can pop when water or the fillets get into the hot oil, so be careful. Do not overfill the pan, only one layer of fillets should be cooked at once with nice space around each fillet. Once they start to get nice and golden brown, I flip them once and then finish cooking them. The meat should be white and flaky and the outside should be golden brown but not burned. I use a wire spoon to remove them.
STEP 6: Serve right away to a group of merry dinner guests, right as the fillets come out of the pan. Have toast slices for people that want to make a sandwich. Raw onion slices, sliced green onion, tartar sauce, hot sauce, cocktail sauce, and lemons for people to choose from. My favorite is to serve the fried panfish fresh lemon squeezed over the top, with sliced scallions, and with Cocktail sauce mixed together with Tabasco to make it spicy. For adults, for the final authentic Wisconsin touch, serve with a cold Pabst, Schlitz, Blatz, Hamms, Old Miliwaukee, Leinie’s, or Miller Lite. Or for a more fancy schmancy, but less authentic version, you could have a modern high-end beerski. Just as good, or better, would be a nice lemonade. Enjoy!
My favorite fish fry. Fresh caught, never frozen Bluegills and Pumpkinseeds, served with onions, spicy cocktail sauce, and a lemon wedge.
Classic Wisconsin Fish Fry with Potato Pancakes
Wisconsin Potato Pancake Recipe
Follow the above recipe, but add wonderful potato pancakes with applesauce! Here's how.
- Chop up one yellow onion
- Peel and then coarsely grate four large potatoes (I use russets). Grate the potatoes when you're ready to proceed with cooking them, don't grate them far ahead of time, as potatoes with oxidize and turn brown.
Grated potatoes for potato pancakes
- Mix together the chopped onion and grated potatoes in a colander and press out the resulting liquid with your hands in order to end up with as dry onion and potato as possible.
- In a separate bowl mix together 1 teaspoon of salt, 2 tablespoons of corn meal, 1 teaspoon of baking powder, and 1 teaspoon of Hungarian paprika.
- Beat an egg and the mix it into the potato mixture
- In a big bowl mix together all the ingredients
- Use your hands to press together pancakes about 4" in diameter and 1/2" to 3/4" thick
- Heat up a big pan of vegetable oil about an inch thick, you want the potato pancakes to rest on the bottom of the pan, you want them to float in the oil.
- Using a spatula, carefully lay the potato pancakes into the hot oil and fry them, flipping them once so that they are toasty brown on both sides.
- Serve with applesauce.
Raw potato pancakes, ready for frying.
Frying potato pancakes in oil
A note on the famous Wisconsin Friday Night Fish Fry: Here in Wisconsin, it is a tradition to have a Friday Fish Fry. Bars and restaurants across the state offer the Friday Fish Fry, which usually includes some range of the following fish, beer-battered cod, fried perch, walleye, sometimes-but-less often bluegills, and often times baked cod for people that want that. This is served with rye bread, tartar sauce, cole slaw, and potato-pancakes with apple sauce. I love a good Friday Fish Fry. They were made popular here in Wisconsin because of how yummy they are, and also because of Catholics not eating meat on Fridays during Lent and at other times of the year. Friday fish frys are a year round thing now and everyone has their favorite spot.