Recipe: Pan-fried Trout

Pan-fried Trout
rec.food.cooking/Scott Fisher/1994

Corn meal (maize meal or polenta)
Bacon or bacon drippings -or- butter
Trout

Clean the trout and pat them dry. You can remove the bones before cooking, in fact your fishmonger might have already done so, but they do slide out easily from cooked fish.

Roll the fish in the corn meal (polenta) to cover it.

Cook the bacon to render out its drippings *or* use bacon drippings reserved from breakfast (or use butter, but the bacon adds a wonderful campfire-woodsmoke character that makes even an urban flat seem more like a campsite by a mountain brook). When very hot, add the trout. Cook for 10 minutes per inch (25mm), half on each side; for the average trout, this should mean about 5 minutes per side.

When done, serve with rice and parboiled, still-crisp snap beans.

As an alternative, brown some sliced blanched almonds in butter, then cook the trout (without corn meal) in the almond flavored butter. (Cook for the same amount of time.) Serve topped with the almonds.