I just finished re-watching the second season of Mind of a Chef on Netflix, so I definitely have a lot of southern-style cooking ideas floating around my head. It doesn’t take much more information than that to see where I got the ideas for today’s Cajun Catfish Tacos.
While most people prefer our mahi-mahi tacos, I have always been a sucker for catfish. I love getting the Blackened Catfish Tidbits at PJ’s BBQ, and the base of this taco started as a play on that. They serve their catfish with a cajun-style tartar sauce, which is what I was looking for when I stumbled onto the recipe for my cajun remoulade sauce.
With cajun grilled catfish and the Cajun remoulade sauce as a solid base, the only thing missing to create a perfect taco was some type of topping that could bring a bit of crunch and some acidity to the mix. The standard here would have been to go with some type of lettuce and maybe a squirt of lime, but after watching all of those southern cooking demonstrations, I had the idea to use pickles instead.
Since we already have our own house-made pickles here, I had plenty at my disposal. So I started by making a salad with cucumbers, tomatoes, and white onions. Then I added in some diced pickles and plenty of extra pickle juice to create a southern-style take on a classic vinaigrette.
When you put acidic crunch of the pickle salad together with the spicy flavors of the cajun catfish and the Cajun remoulade sauce, the combined flavor gives you all of those little things that we love about the south.
