The sauce is so-named because it takes just a few ingredients and seconds to make an absolutely magical sauce. This sandwich would be nothing without it. Feel free to buy your fish fingers but making your own is dead easy and you get the opportunity to use responsibly sourced fish. If you’ve got the time, use homemade mayonnaise .
Tip: If you can flour, egg and breadcrumb with one hand, you might find it gets a little less messy.
Makes: 4
Season: Autumn/Year-Round
Photography: Sam Harris
600g skinless thick white fish fillets – cod, pollack or monkfish
75g plain flour
1 large egg, beaten with 1 tbsp milk
150g fresh white breadcrumbs
Sunflower oil, for frying
Salt and pepper
TA DA! SAUCE
1 shallot, roughly chopped
1½ tbsp capers, soaked if salted
2 tbsp cornichons or pickled cucumbers, chopped
A handful of parsley/or tarragon leaves (or a mix), roughly chopped
100g mayonnaise, shop-bought or homemade
100g Greek yogurt
Juice of ½ lemon, the other ½ reserved as wedges, to serve
TO SERVE
Ketchup
8 slices of nice bread
A couple of handfuls of shredded lettuce and/or lettuce leaves
Method
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Make the sauce first. Stir the ingredients together, adjusting the acid balance with a little more lemon juice if you feel you need it and add a little seasoning. It should be very, very perky.
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Cut the fish into fish finger-sized pieces (or whatever size you wish; just try and make them even). Grab yourself three large plates. Put the flour on one and season very generously, pour the beaten egg and milk mix onto another, and tip the breadcrumbs onto the third. Cover the fish pieces in flour, shake to discard the excess, then coat in egg and finally in breadcrumbs.
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Turn on your oven to low to keep the fish warm. Set a large, heavy-based frying pan over a medium heat and pour in enough oil to come 1 cm up the sides. Get the oil hot enough to brown a few breadcrumbs in 10 seconds, and then lower in the fish fingers, in batches, and fry until golden, about 2–3 minutes on each side. Keep each batch warm in the oven while you cook the rest. Once all are cooked, season with salt and sit on top of 4 slices of ketchup-smeared bread. Spoon over the sauce, scatter over some lettuce, top each with another slice of bread and eat immediately with lemon wedges.
Read more: Let’s Do Lunch
Georgia’s cooking is simple, and it’s exactly what you want when you don’t want to spend too much time in the kitchen but still eat incredibly delicious food. It’s inventive, fun and her cookbook will mean that you’ll pretty much never be out of ideas for lunch again. Extracted from: Let’s Do Lunch: Quick and easy recipes to brighten up your week by Georgia Levy (Pavilion, HarperCollins Publishers). Image by Sam A Harris.
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