Ok, this recipe for buffalo fish tacos started out as chicken but we are frequently gifted fresh caught fish from our dear friends on a somewhat regular basis so I thought I’d try it with fish. Who can turn down fresh caught Kokanee?!?! I admit at first it was a little hard to get the kids to eat the Kokanee as often as we would get them, but once I started making these buffalo fish tacos I never heard another complaint…well, except once, I’ll tell you about that at the end of this post 😉

Fish Bones!

The beauty of these tacos is they taste delicious of course, but they also allow for me to remove all the bones from the Kokanee very quickly and easily! I bake them whole, skins on and everything, except the guts of course, our friends gut them before they give them to us 🙂 I sprinkle them with my homemade blackened salmon seasoning before baking them in the oven. When they are done my husband removes the skin and most of the big bones pretty easily with one big, slow pull. The mostly deboned fish go into a mixing bowl where I mash it with a fork. As I mash and mix the smaller bones pop out and are pretty easy to identify and discard. I mix and mash until I’ve gotten all the smaller remaining bones and decide I’m tired of that. There are still some really really tiny bones left but they don’t seem to bother us.

Preheat oven to 375*

Ingredients:

Baking the Fish

• 1 1/2 lbs fresh, mild fish (I use Kokanee)
• Avocado Oil, spray to coat
• Blackened Salmon Seasoning

Buffalo Marinade for the Fish

• 1/3 cup salsa (my homemade salsa is perfect for this!)
• 1 Tbps hot sauce (I use Tapatio)
• 1 tsp garlic powder
• 1/2 tsp celery salt
• 1/2 tsp paprika
• 1/4 tsp ground black pepper
• 1 Tbsp avocado oil (or olive oil)
• 1 Tbsp honey

Blue Cheese Slaw

• 1/3 cup mayonnaise
• 1/3 cup blue chese crumbles (Costco!)
• 1/3 cup fresh cilantro, chopped
• 2 Tbsp honey
• 1 1/2 Tbsp apple cider vinegar
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 1/8 tsp ground black pepper
• 14oz bag coleslaw mix (or 1/4 head green cabbage, chopped, 1/4 head purple cabbage, chopped, 2 medium carrots, sliced with a peeler)

Serving

• 8-12 Corn Tortillas or Mission Gluten-Free Tortillas
• cilantro leaves
• red onion, thinly sliced

Directions:

Baking the Fish

1. Line cookie sheet with parchment paper. Rinse and pat fish to dry. Line up on the parchment paper, slightly overlapping and alternating orientation to get the most even cooking of the fish. (see below) Lightly cover with a few sprays of avocado oil. Sprinkle with the blackened Salmon seasoning.
2. Bake for 14 minutes at 375* then broil for an additional 2-3 minutes.
3. Remove and let cool before removing the skin and bones. Slowly peel away the main, large bone structure. Place fish in a large bowl then mix and mash with a fork. As you stir the smaller remaining bones with show themselves. Don’t worry about the super tiny ones, you won’t notice them.

Buffalo Marinade & Blue Cheese Slaw

1. Meanwhile, prepare the buffalo marinade for the fish. In a small bowl, mix together all the marinade ingredients and set aside to mix with the fish once most of the bones are removed.
2. In a separate large bowl, mix together all the ingredients for the blue cheese slaw. You can eat it immediately, or if you have time and would like it to soften and meld, cover and refrigerate for 2 hours.

Serving

1. Once the fish has been deboned and mixed with the marinade and the slaw is prepared, it’s time to eat! Place a small amount on a corn tortilla or Mission Gluten-Free Tortillas. Can be reheated in a toaster oven or in a skillet if the fish has cooled too much.
2. Top with the blue cheese slaw and garnish with cilantro leaves and red onion.
3. Store fish and slaw separately, in sealed containers, up to 3 days in the fridge. Enjoy!

Tips & Tricks:

Small Fish – here is an example of how to arrange smaller fish on your baking sheet to allow for even cooking…

Blue Cheese – You do have to be careful with blue cheese crumbles! Not all are gluten-free! Luckily the Costco’s IS gluten-free 🙂

Salsa – If you don’t have my delicious homemade salsa on hand our next best favorite is Reser’s Baja Cafe Pico De Gallo Medium Salsa. I also just tried some Trader Joe’s salsas and both the medium and extra hot are delicious with this as well.

Coleslaw Mix -If you don’t have coleslaw mix on hand you can always make some homemade coleslaw using roughly chopped green and/or purple cabbage along with carrots “sliced” with a peeler. The equivalent of 14oz bag of coleslaw would be 1/4 head green cabbage, 1/4 head purple cabbage, and 2 medium carrots.

Cilantro Storage – I had to share this other great tip I learned years ago from another friend…how to properly store cilantro!! I love to always have cilantro on hand but if you are like me you’ve noticed it doesn’t keep too long in the vegetable drawer in a bag. It get’s slimy and gross super fast!

So here’s what we do now…If I’m not going to use the whole bunch right away I separate out the smaller and broken stems to use right away. The taller stems I collect on the side, peeling lower leaves, if any, off the bottom 2-3 inches of the stems. Place them in a ball jar with water. Loosely wrap a paper towel around the leaves and cover with the plastic vegetable bag from the store. Place in the door of your fridge or as close to the front of the fridge as possible, this way it won’t get too cold. Cilantro stored this way will stay fresh up to 2-3 weeks!!

Gadgets – You’ve got to try this oil sprayer! I use this pretty much all the time now! It’s great for starting a stir fry without pouring a ton of oil into the pan. But it’s also great for covering the fish in this recipe or if you want to lightly coat some chicken before air frying!!

I’ve tried lots of different oil sprayers and this one is the best by far! No pumping necessary, simply squeeze the trigger for a nice wide, light fan of oil. I use Costco’s avocado oil in this with no problems. I thought I broke this once but realized I just needed to clean it out (after over a year of use!) with some hot water and let dry thoroughly before refilling with oil.

TOO HOT!!!…the story I promised you…

Ok, I told you I’d tell you about the one time the kids DIDN’T want to eat these buffalo fish tacos… it had been a little while sine I had made these…I forgot that I had made some changes to the original recipe and I hadn’t posted this recipe to my site yet. The original recipe called for 1/3 cup hot sauce but we discovered we prefer 1/3 salsa and 1 Tbsp hot sauce….this is the part I forgot 😉

But there’s more…. My dad loves hot sauce, so much so that he drinks it straight from the bottle. It was Christmas and I was having fun finding a bunch of different hot sauces for him. A fun challenge is to try to find one that might be too hot for him to drink. Usually I fail in that challenge, however, this year Trader Joe’s had one that looked like it might be a winner. I sent him a bottle of their Habanero Hot Sauce which he reported back was indeed very HOT!! You’d think that would have clued me in right?

Well, I’m not sure what I was thinking, but I proceeded to measure out the hot sauce for this recipe using the FULL amount of hot sauce, NOT subbing with salsa, AND using Trader Joe’s crazy hot habanero hot sauce 🙁 Literally, NO ONE COULD EAT the fish tacos! One bite and you were on fire! So on fire you couldn’t even swallow that one bite. Ugh!

Not wanting to waste the fresh Kokanee, I did a little research and found that tomatoes help neutralize spice! I added not one but TWO cans of diced tomatoes to the fish mixture and surprisingly it did bring down the heat considerably! The tomatoes didn’t ruin the fish at all, in fact they added moisture and flavor to the fish. The kids were too afraid to try another bite but I was able to finish off the kokanee and not die 🙂 I learned my lesson and also learned a trick to reducing overly spicy foods, I’ll take that as a win 🙂 Thanks for reading 🙂

On another note, here are some homemade seasonings and sauces we like to use in our recipes…