The lutefisk fish fry

lye makes everything taste better

Salutations, clowns!

Something funny happened yesterday: Boing Boing caught wind of my condom cooking experiment from the other week and posted about it. Heh. I only write about hard-hitting investigative shit on my newsletter. Everyone else is just late to the game. This is merely one of the many responsibilities that the greatest food writer in all of history must assume.

I could spend the rest of this edition bragging about this Boing Boing achievement, but since I have the words “Rise and Grind: The Hustle Never Stops” tattooed across my asscheeks, I must keep moving.

As you all know, it’s the Lenten season, when people give something up in order to spiritually simulate being Jesus for 40 days. Though I am not a man of religion, I still find these traditions very fascinating, because they surprisingly affect my diet. That’s because a lot of people avoid meat on Fridays due to Lent.

Thanks to this custom, the Friday night fish fry is a big thing, especially up in Wisconsin, which is where Davida is from. A fish fry is run as a special at a lot of Wisconsin restaurants (year-round, almost always on Fridays), where they serve up all sorts of deep-fried whitefish like cod, perch, or walleye, usually with a side of fries and coleslaw. Frankly, they’re awesome, and I love partaking in them when we’re up north.

I still question the notion that fish isn’t “meat,” however, because fish generally dislike it when you try to eat them. I suppose I am just a mere speck of dust and not necessarily here to question the mandate of God. Perhaps He deliberately gave some of us the inability to not recognize fish as living creatures specifically so we could have really delicious Friday nights at the bar.

Lent is a long time to be eating the same types of fish frys over and over again, though. I thought to myself, “Dannis Ree, as the greatest food writer in all of history, you must take it upon yourself to disrupt the Friday night fish fry, because it’s 2025. Everything needs disrupting, otherwise it’s a waste of space. Just ask the lady who founded Theranos.”

So I considered using different types of fish for a fish fry. Would Swedish Fish work? How about jellyfish? I was starting to bang my head against the wall, so I did what I always do every week. I asked Davida what she thought.

“How about lutefisk?” she asked.

Ah, yes, lutefisk. I’d read about lutefisk plenty of times, but never actually had it. In case you have no idea what the fuck I’m talking about, lutefisk is a Scandinavian fish dish made from whitefish that’s been dried, then cured in delicious, caustic, lye. Before it’s eaten it’s rehydrated in water, and it’s one of those foods that’s celebrated by its population of origin, but reviled by a lot of other people. Most of the United States won’t touch the stuff, but a small population of Scandinavian-Americans in Minnesota and Wisconsin still eat it.

In the parlance of this newsletter, “reviled” is always good. So let’s fuck with some lutefisk fish fry today.

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Before I continue — just a nudge. I’ve run this newsletter for a long time now, over five years, which makes this thing practically ancient now. It’s a labor of love and so much fun to do nearly every week, but it is labor, so I just wanted to let you know that your subscriptions go a long way for me. So no matter how long you’ve been here, consider springing for a paid subscription to support the fun, okay?

(Today’s is still free, by the way, and I will always still send out free ones. It’s not fair to gatekeep all the fun.)

The first order was…finding lutefisk.

Living in the big city of Chicago has its advantages, because all I had to do was call one of our local fish markets (shoutout to Hagen’s). At first, the employee wasn’t sure they had any, but then he dug through their deep freezer and confirmed I could come grab it whenever I wanted.

So I went and picked it up (it cost $20, in case you were curious), and bought the remaining other stuff I needed for the fish fry at the supermarket.

I defrosted the lutefisk overnight, but it was still a touch frozen, so I finished thawing it in the sink using some cold running water.

For the most part, it handled like a delicate raw fish, and if you handed it to me to make dinner with, I probably wouldn’t have thought too much about it.

Except maybe, who are you, how did you get into our apartment, and why are you handing me this weird raw fish?!

I sliced (hacked) up four chunks for the purpose of frying them, and set them aside while I whipped up some beer batter.

And by “whipped up,” I mean I put together a beer batter box mix.

Listen, I was curious. It took me a while to find it at the store, but I noticed that other boxes of similar product next to it looked really old. Maybe the grocery store puts them in the basement and only whips them out for Lent every year.

This stuff is easy to make, too.

All you need to do is to stir water or beer into the batter mix, and you’re good to go. Though this appears to be some sort of creamy substance, it’s actually leftover Beck’s beer from the sous vide condom sausage-cooking experiment. Those are words that wouldn’t make any sense next to each other in any other context other than this newsletter.

I gave the soft pieces of fish a dunk in the batter and now it was time to give them a hot bath.

I already had a Dutch oven with some oil preheating on the stove, and I gently lowered the battered lutefisk pieces in it.

I really need to invest in a splatter guard, because shit immediately got violent. That was probably on me for forgetting to dry the lutefisk off before I put it in the beer batter. Giant drops of oil rained across the kitchen and I have a feeling I’m going to be finding more droplets on the wall for weeks.

I let the fish go for about four minutes until I decided to give the chunks a flip.

But when I tried lifting each piece up with my tongs, I realized I had a fish fry emergency. That’s because the batter had fused with the bottom of the Dutch oven. I grabbed a metal spatula and gently tried to pry each piece off with the batter intact, but all I succeeded in doing was ripping all the crust off each piece of fish.

I guess I’d make a terrible bar line cook.

One thing I noticed as I eventually scraped the fish out of the pot was that it had shrunk significantly in volume.

Each piece was a lot smaller than when it went in. Most of the recipes I’ve seen for lutefisk calls for it to be baked or boiled, so I’m guessing that frying the living shit out of it didn’t do it any favors. I let the fish drain on some paper towels and started to set up the rest of my fish fry plate.

First, I air-fried some frozen french fries, because fries count as a very important vegetable on every plate in America.

Then, I added a heaping spoonful of store-bought coleslaw. If you’re having coleslaw at a fish fry, it must always taste so sweet it might bore a hole in your teeth, and if it’s in the vicinity of any other food on your plate, it will eventually become warm and you will probably not eat it. Think of the coleslaw more as obligation than something you’re required to put in your mouth.

Then, of course, you must have one garnish that is green, because otherwise everything else on your plate might appear to blend into one confusing shape, and you will not know where to begin eating.

The lutefisk had cooled down enough to transfer it to my plate, and so I let the gang examine my handiwork.

I could tell by their beady eyes that I was being judged, but then I told them angrily that only God can judge me. Then I played the song “Only God Can Judge Me” by 2Pac feat. Rappin’ 4-Tay on full blast.

Can’t forget the tartar sauce!

The reason why I’m zooming in on this is because I like its brand name. This tartar sauce is made by a company called Bookbinders. Based off the way some used bookstores smell, it’s hard not to wonder if some books are actually bound with tartar sauce.

I’m not entirely sure what I was expecting, but I was completely unprepared for what I ended up with.

I’d heard a lot of people describe lutefisk as “gelatinous,” which certainly isn’t wrong. That’s an apt description, though I think the deep-frying had tightened mine up a little bit. That being said, it was impossible to handle with the fork, which is why I immediately spilled some of it on the kitchen island. It didn’t flake so much as it did immediately disintegrate. In terms of its texture, this stuff is quite strange, because it didn’t seem that far off from that of raw fish, even though I knew I’d cooked the everloving shit out of it.

It also sort of tasted raw, but that could just have been a mental thing based off the way it looked. But it did have this odd aftertaste, because when people say lutefisk has a soapy aftertaste, they’re not kidding. It totally does. I think it’s still amazing human beings somehow figured out how to utilize lye as a preservation method for food, but the fact that you can taste its effects is still wild to me.

Okay, the ol’ Friday night fish fry is safe from meddling, for now. It is clear God did not wish for me to mess with His favorite Friday night meal. But I guess that means that I, too, unknowingly participated in Lent this year by taking something that I loved, and sacrificing it in order to understand Jesus’ worldly suffering.

Wait, does that mean I’m saved now? Because based off this newsletter alone, I have a lot to atone for.

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Damn, and here I was hoping that I’d be one of the few people to end up loving lutefisk. Though it did occur to me that I still don’t know what it’s really supposed to taste like.

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Okay, that’s it for today! I’ll be contacting one of you lucky folks in regards to last week’s book giveaway very soon. As always, I love you very much, and I’ll see you paid subscribers next week.