Cafeteria Baked Fish: copycat Luby’s prep. Next time we’ll add some paprika or bread crumbs for a more appealing surface appearance.
Our success with Mediterranean Baked Fish made us nostalgic for the cafeteria baked fish served at the late lamented Highland Park Cafeteria. I recall it as being moist and juicy with a mild butter based sauce and a sprinkle of paprika on top. HPC apparently took its recipes to the grave (a tease by the owner at closing time that he would eventually share some recipes has not come to fruition) but Google’s AI suggests we might like the fish served at competitor Luby’s: “This recipe is a popular copycat that mimics the tender, flaky fish and light golden-brown topping typical of classic Texas cafeterias.” Their source recipe is here; it uses an improbable 3-4 c of mayonnaise for 3 lb of fish so this version is probably more reasonable. Time for a taste test!
The contender: cafeteria baked fish with butter and lemon juice.
We acquired some generic white fish (HPC used halibut, but that is prohibitively expensive nowadays) and prepared one portion as we imagined it might have been done in our remembered dish: lightly salted and peppered, generous pats of butter on top, a good amount of lemon juice and a dusting of paprika before serving. The other prep generally followed the Luby’s copycat: filets were salted and peppered, dredged in flour, then lightly coated with mayo (we used maybe ¼ c total for 1 ¼ lb fish). We added a little water as suggested by one of the copycat recipes; made sense because we didn’t want to risk the flour sticking to the pan. We didn’t have any lemon pepper seasoning so we shook on some Old Bay.
The results? Walla! The butter and lemon juice fish was dry and uninteresting but the copycat Luby’s version had the tenderness and juiciness we were looking for. Neither the mayo nor the flour were detectible in the finished dish. Next time we’d add some lemon juice and butter and more water for nice pan juices, and maybe experiment (as some other copycat Luby’s recipes do) with a topping of toasted buttered bread crumbs (which was definitely not part of the HPC version) or running the finished dish under the broiler for a bit of a crust. To be continued!
Never had cafeteria fish….but this looks easy and delicious!!