Easy Canned Mackerel Fish Cakes

Don’t be afraid of canned fish! The good stuff really can make fast and really tasty dishes like these canned mackerel fish cakes.

These are super easy to make from ingredients that you may already have at home and they make for a delicious meal.

Making Fish Cakes with Tinned Fish.

I am often to be found here bemoaning the seriously limited access I have to great fresh fish and seafood.

This tinned mackerel recipe is just one way of me dealing with that.

To be perfectly honest I seldom cooked with canned fish until fairly recently.

However, I was leafing through a Gordon Ramsey cookbook and he was extolling the virtues of good quality tinned mackerel.

So I figured I would give his pasta dish a punt and loved it. Although that original inspiration morphed into a smoked mackerel pasta recipe.

If you want a sauce then a simple parsley sauce would be a great addition to this recipe.

How to Freeze Fish Cakes.

Buoyed by this experience I was on a mission and I have spent a couple of months working on some fish cake recipes.

These are indulgent, super quick to make and if you are like me you probably have most of the ingredients in your pantry.

They also freeze wonderfully, you can either freeze before the panne process or after. Chill first and then wrap in baking parchment before freezing.

As everything in these fish cakes is already cooked you don’t really need to cook so it is just a case of bringing to temperature.

They just need shallow frying for a couple of minutes to get a nice colour and then straight in the oven.

They typically take about 15-20 minutes to cook from frozen as opposed to the 10 minutes when fresh.

Cooking With Canned Fish.

Growing up in the UK, great quality fresh fish is not difficult to find.

So cooking with canned fish never really a thing for me. Since moving to Hungary I have discovered a whole new range of produce.

I’m definitely a convert to canned fish, naturally, the quality varies and the cheap stuff is beyond nasty.

But invest in good quality ingredients and you have an amazing product that I consider more than worthy to grace my table.

A canned mackerel recipe really does live and die on the quality of the mackerel!

It is particularly good in fish cakes. You can look beyond mackerel as well!

Tinned Sardines make an appearance in these salmon fish cakes and spiced up tuna in these Thai fish cakes.

But it is not just great in fish cakes, there is, of course, the classic tuna pasta salad!