Tonight was supposed to be his turn to cook: the last half of the pork shoulder roast I bought in December that's been taking up freezer space. (As a rule I'd try to reserve it for souvlaki, but we haven't much wanted to do campfire cooking yet, so I relented on its use. Besides, I'll be leaving him alone for a few days and he's feeling a bit of food insecurity. If you could see the refrigerator and freezer you'd know how preposterous that is, but he wants what he wants.) Then the weather was nice, and the roast wasn't thawing fast enough, and we spent a good deal of the afternoon playing music with a neighbor, so it came down to quick dinner instead.
I can now give a side-by-side comparison of the two kinds of frozen fish we have in the freezer: Van de Kamp's Beer Battered Fish filets, and Gorton's Crunchy Breaded Fish filets. Both fish are pollock, although I had to look harder at the Van de Kamp's package to figure that out.
I'll admit that right off the bat I'm prejudiced: the shorter ingredient list is the reason I bought Gorton's in the first place. Still, he picked out the beer battered fish. He doesn't read ingredient lists (or corporate ownership labels), and marvels that I bother.
One issue with a side-by-side test, when cooking them in the same pan, is that Gorton's was supposed to get a few minutes' less cooking. I didn't think to add them to the pan after giving the Van de Kamp's a head start. In the collage below, you can see the difference in color. On the left, the uncooked filets; on the right, finished.
The panko-coated (Gorton's) filets were easier to turn; I could use tongs with them. The Van de Kamp's were flaky and tender and prone to falling apart. They demanded a spatula.
This was a quick dinner to prepare. Once the oven was preheated, the filets cooked in 20 minutes. In the last 10 minutes, I cooked broccoli and cauliflower on stove top, with Berbera spice mix and butter and enough water to steam them until tender.
Dinner:
You can clearly see the difference in the fish color; the difference in texture is more subtle. The panko-coated fish were firmer as well as darker. Would the fish have been more comparable, if the beer-battered fish had been cooked longer? It will be worth finding out.
In both cases the fish was flaky. This is the best pair of photos I could get.
We liked the flavors. At first I preferred the beer-battered (Van de Kamp's) fish because it seemed just a touch more flavorful, but after a few bites I began to think the extra flavor was mostly salt. He preferred the panko-crusted (Gorton's) fish from start to finish, much to his surprise.
The upshot: we'll be happy with either, for a quick nobody-feels-like-cooking dinner, but we're more likely to keep Gorton's around. There are other brands, and other treatments, so we'll probably try them. I draw the line at fish sticks, though!
