Easy Skillet Tilapia Recipe - How to Cook the BEST Tilapia Fish! (2024)

FAQs

How do you cook tilapia so it doesn't taste like fish? ›

Cook Tilapia in a flavorful sauce such as a tomato or curry sauce. The sauce will add a lot of flavor to the fish and mask any fishy taste. Use strong spices and herbs to mask fishy taste and make it more palatable. Curry powder, paprika, cumin and ginger are a few examples.

You should never wash raw fish in your sink, either.

Remove the scales from fish if a recipe calls for it, but leave your fish unrinsed to prevent your kitchen from becoming a breeding ground for germs.

To keep your fish from falling apart, use a large enough nonstick spatula for flipping and a nonstick pan to avoid the fish from sticking to the pan. Avoid overcooking fish or steaming fish on low heat, but rather pan-fry on medium-high heat until just cooked through.

Fresh tilapia is good, frozen, depending where it's from can be unappetizing. Try mashed fresh garlic, smoked paprika, olive oil, salt, pepper, fresh lemon, whatever herbs you like, marinade, then cook in butter and olive oil.

When meat or fish touch a hot metal pan, the heat unravels (or denatures) the muscle proteins, exposing a lot of their surface to the metal. The proteins then start to form chemical bonds with the metal, causing them to stick.

In this scenario, the protein in the milk binds with the compounds that cause that fishy odor, in essence extracting if from the fish. What's left behind is sweet-smelling, brighter flesh with clean flavor. (Just make sure you pour that milk down the drain.

Per WebMD, fish is similar to poultry in that washing it raw can cause any bacteria to spread around your sink and kitchen, increasing the likelihood you will get sick. Raw fish is known to contain dangerous bacteria, including salmonella, listeria, and clostridium.

Therefore, be sure to account for this and remove the fish from the heat when the temperature is slightly below 145°F, so that it's internal temperature will rise to the perfect level after resting away from the heat for a few minutes. This will ensure you do not overcook fish accidentally.

As fish cooks, proteins in the muscle fibers coagulate and the flesh changes from translucent to opaque in appearance. When the collagen softens in heat, it loses its structure and turns to gelatin; the muscle fibers have little to hold them together and the fish separates easily into flakes.

Although fry have shelter in their mother's mouth for several days after hatching, fry and young fish will be eaten by mature males and even by some females if they are confined in close quarters. It's important to keep the fry separate from older fish.

Can you overcook tilapia? ›

However, one of the easiest and most popular ways to prepare this fish is to pop it in the oven. While baking tilapia is relatively straightforward, both overcooking and undercooking can lead to disappointing results.

Fish is prepared in four stages: scaling, trimming, gutting and, if necessary, filleting. Fish is generally scaled before it is gutted, as it is easier to scale if the belly is slightly rounded. The tools used are a fish scaler or the back of a knife.

Off-flavour in cultured tilapia is caused by micro-organisms in the water, such as algae and bacteria, which causes the fish to have an earthy-musty, metallic, sweet-sweet or muddy taste.

Soak It in Lemon

Lemon juice, or really any acid, reacts with the TMA in fish to get rid of the odor. This includes limes, oranges, vinegar and tomato sauce. "I love adding lemon or a vinegar-based marinade and letting it bask in those flavors to help remove any fishy taste," Routhenstein says.

Use Milk. Thawing out fish fillets in milk is another great overnight hack! Again, this should be done in the refrigerator, not out on the counter, but the fat in milk helps further remove any “fishy” flavors and adds a milk sweetness to the flesh. Just make sure to use either whole or 2% milk.