Fisherman’s Pie
The seafood variant of the British shepherd's pie and cottage pie, fisherman's pie is baked with Bechamel sauce and topped with mashed potatoes. In this recipe, Alaskan pollock was combined with smoked milkfish.We topped the mashed potatoes with cheese.

Ingredients
- 1 ½ cups full fat milk
- 600 to 700 grams fish fillets (see notes after the recipe)
- 2 tablespoons butter
- ¼ cup chopped carrot
- ¼ cup thinly sliced celery
- 2 cloves garlic chopped
- salt
- pepper
- ½ recipe Béchamel sauce (click the link for the recipe)
- 4 cups mashed potatoes (see notes after the recipe)
- ½ cup grated mature Cheddar or any hard salty cheese
Instructions
- Preheat the oven to 400F.
- In a wide sauce pan, heat the milk just until small bubbles appear on the edges.
- Spread the fish fillets in the milk and poach for five minutes.
- Scoop out the fish, discard the skins, break up the flesh into chunks and set aside.
- In another pan, melt the butter and saute the celery, carrot and garlic with two pinches of salt and a pinch of pepper.
- Make the Béchamel sauce using the milk in which you poached the fish.
- Turn off the heat. Fold the fish and vegetables into the Béchamel sauce.
- Spread the fish mixture into a 7"x11" baking dish.
- Spread the prepared mashed potatoes over the fish.
- Spread grated cheese on top of the mashed potatoes.
- Bake the fisherman's pie in a preheated 400F oven for 20 to 25 minutes or until bubbly and lightly browned on top.
- Take the fisherman's pie out of the oven and leave to rest for at least ten minutes before cutting and serving.
Notes
You may use just about any firm and fleshy fish to cook fisherman’s pie. We combined Alaskan pollock with smoked milkfish here. Using smoked milkfish and topping the mashed potatoes with cheese do not appear to be traditional but Donal Skehan’s recipe on which we based ours was so inspiring that we decided to adapt both tweaks.
The mashed potatoes were made made the traditional way with butter and milk.
To avoid wasting the milk in which the fish fillets were poached, we used that for the Béchamel sauce and the mashed potatoes.


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