The Pastry Tool You Need To Easily Check When Fish Is Cooked Through

Fish is a delicate protein to cook. Its tender flesh can quickly fall apart during the cooking process or get burned on the outside while staying raw on the inside. Knowing how to recognize when your fish is perfectly done will help you out in all the different ways to cook fish. While there are many hacks floating around the internet for checking the doneness of your fish, using a simple cake tester is without a doubt the cheapest one. This pastry tool only costs about $5–10 but stands to make you a more efficient and confident cook.

A cake tester, more commonly used to check the doneness of cakes and pastries, is a thin metal spike with a holder on top. The easiest and fastest way to use it when cooking fish is in place of a meat thermometer for checking the temperature of the flesh. Stick it in the thickest part of the fish, leave it for a few seconds, then pull it out. Place it against your skin to feel the temperature of the metal. If it's hot, the fish is overcooked. If it's cool, the fish is still raw. The temperature you're going for is warm — that's when you know the fish is done. This is similar to the knife hack for checking the doneness of fish, except the cake tester is much thinner and therefore less likely to pierce the delicate fish too much.

One of the tips you need when cooking with fish is to be mindful of its texture throughout the cooking process. This is another angle where a cake tester is useful and can help you determine whether the fish is done. Place the tester inside the raw fish to see how it feels. You'll notice a lot of resistance in the flesh. After the fish is cooked, this resistance will be gone completely, and the cake tester will easily glide through. The more you use this method, the better you'll become at recognizing the correctly soft texture. If you're ever unsure, you can still test the temperature after pulling the cake tester out of the flesh to give you peace of mind.

You could replicate this same trick with a fork or a thicker metal skewer, but they're more likely to damage the tender texture of your fish once it's already cooked. For checking the texture, a toothpick could also come in handy — just remember that it won't be useful for the temperature check because wood is not a good heat conductor.