Frozen Fish Fillets That Can Satisfy Your McDonald's Filet-O-Fish Craving

There are more than 13,000 McDonald's restaurants in the United States, which means you're never too far away from the nearest Golden Arches. The chain established itself as a fast food juggernaut with a lineup of crowd-pleasing signature offerings, including the irresistible McDonald's Filet-O-Fish. First introduced to the menu in 1965, the sandwich is a relatively basic affair. The Filet-O-Fish is made with pollock, processed into a patty, breaded, and fried, and then tossed onto a plain bun and adorned with a slice of American cheese and some tartar sauce. It's a polarizing sandwich, but it enjoys a huge fan base, even outside the self-deprivation period of Lent.

Ultimately, the Filet-O-Fish is a modest and humble sandwich made with readily available ingredients, which means that one can be made at home by even the most amateur cooks. But why do that if there's a McDonald's down the street? Well, the hankering may hit after McDonald's closes for the night or if it's still only serving breakfast items. With fast food prices on the rise, it may also be cheaper to whip up a DIY Filet-O-Fish-like sandwich with the ingredients you may likely already have in your pantry and freezer.

Determined to find the best way to do so, we taste-tested several frozen fish products. From taste to texture, here's how six different products stacked up when making a faux Filet-O-Fish at home.

Gorton's doesn't just have one of the best food mascots — it's also one of the most famous names in heat-and-eat fish. Its signature yellow packaging has been a firm fixture in America's cold boxes since it first pioneered frozen convenience food in the 1940s. Gorton's Fish Sandwich Breaded Fillets are among the few widely available boneless, dredged, and precooked seafood products that come specifically in a ready-for-sandwiches form. It's also a high-quality product; the breading is made from light and tasty panko bread crumbs, while the fish inside is wild-caught Alaskan pollock.

When placed on a simple bun with the addition of some American cheese and tartar sauce, per the requirements of a Filet-O-Fish, the Gorton's Fish Sandwich Breaded Fillet outclasses its inspiration. The fish is flakier, juicier, meatier, and less oily than the pollock patty used at McDonald's, while the breading easily crisps up and doesn't bog down the sandwich as a gummy paste, as is occasionally the case with the Filet-O-Fish. Making one of these at home may be easier, and certainly tastier, than getting a fish-wich at McDonald's.

Walmart's contribution to the frozen fish market, Great Value Crispy Battered Fish Fillets, seems to have some promise as an option for a home recreation of a McDonald's Filet-O-Fish. Mostly, that's because both fried fish entries are made from pollock. The Great Value version purports to be made from whole fillets, although the packaging doesn't explicitly say that each fish piece is strictly a whole fillet. It would seem like they're not because these fillets are not very strong or meaty, and they easily fall apart upon cooking, suggesting that the flakiness is a symptom of the patties just being chopped fish smashed together.

While the outside of these Great Value extra-large fish sticks cooks up an appealingly golden brown, just like the Filet-O-Fish, the seafood inside still seems underdone. This doesn't matter much taste-wise because the breading drives the overall taste. To that end, a sandwich made with this fish product does taste surprisingly akin to a Filet-O-Fish, albeit one that's been lying under a McDonald's heat lamp for a while. The addition of cheese and tartar sauce really pulls a lot of weight in making this taste like the fast food original. Sometimes, the at-home frozen version is the best you can do, and you've got to accept that it's just going to be an adequate choice at best.

Van de Kamp's is a significant frozen fish provider, and among all of its various products of different sizes and styles of breading, its Crispy Battered Fillets are arguably the best for replicating the McDonald's Filet-O-Fish. Like its fast food counterpart, a sandwich that utilizes one of Van de Kamp's fillets (or two) begins with wild-caught pollock, a white fish similar to cod or haddock. It's a flaky, rich fish, and the breading used here is reminiscent of the light addition of breadcrumbs used by McDonald's.

If anything, a homemade sandwich with Van de Kamp's Crispy Battered Fillets in the middle is actually slightly superior to a Filet-O-Fish. These fish patties are real fillets, not chopped and formed, and they're a little thinner, more buttery, and taste relatively fresh. They're also crispier than the Filet-O-Fish protein rectangle, similar to the fish used in pub-style fish and chips at sit-down restaurants. Once bread, cheese, and tartar sauce are added, the taste is complemented nicely and never gets too fishy.

Stouffer's frozen dinners are ubiquitous in supermarkets and home freezers, and they're a relatively inexpensive meal option to keep on hand. There might be one lingering in one's freezer right now, and it's a viable option if you're craving a fast food fix. While it may cost about the same as a Filet-O-Fish, the Stouffer's Fish Filet Frozen Meal also includes a side of decently thick and creamy macaroni and cheese, so it's well worth it to ignore the serving suggestion on the box and plop that big hunk of fish onto a bun with some cheese and tartar sauce.

The sandwich created winds up more like a deluxe fast food sandwich because the fish employed here is real Alaskan pollock (just like what's found in a Filet-O-Fish), and there's a lot of it, as it's supposed to be a dinner-size portion. It cooks up to a pale and unappetizing light brown, but the taste is exceptional, peppery and only lightly fishy, all under a breading so light you can't even taste it; it's only there to add crispy texture.

A well-made and high-priced frozen fish product, it seems silly to use a SeaPak Beer Battered Cod as the main element in a purposely low-level fast food-style fish sandwich, but if the craving comes and this is what's in the freezer, then who are we to judge? While the Filet-O-Fish at McDonald's is made from pollock, SeaPak uses cod, but a very top-shelf grade of it, and instead of a panko breading, this option is covered in a thick coating of beer batter that provides a crispy, crunchy, and thick outer layer. Just one SeaPak cod piece is almost the size of a baseball, and it completely fills out the width of the bun and then some.

In the end, the SeaPak Beer Battered Cod resembles the Filet-O-Fish in white fish goodness, but not much else. All that breading works solely as a counterpart to the fish, making for a rough sandwich experience. The batter, combined with a white hamburger bun, is just too much bread, and it gets gummy and mushy, a problem exacerbated by fake cheese and tartar sauce. But still, it gets the job done because a SeaPak Beer Battered Cod sandwich makes for a very filling and off-kilter take on the Filet-O-Fish.

While this breaded-and-fried, heat-and-eat item found in the freezers of Trader Joe's outlets nationwide doesn't resemble a Filet-O-Fish patty at all, it's also made with Alaskan pollock and yields a homemade sandwich that tastes and feels the most like McDonald's industry-standard sandwich.

McDonald's doesn't overly batter its fish, and neither does Trader Joe's. The coating on the cod is light and loose, and only uses as much as necessary in order to let the high-quality and extremely firm fish take the spotlight. Two of these nuggets on a bun almost exactly equate to the same real estate occupied by the patty in a Filet-O-Fish, in terms of both height and width. The fish nuggets wind up creating a thicker sandwich, but that comes from fish that is both juicy and naturally flaky instead of from the breading. It pairs well with the tartar sauce and cheese and can hold its own without the whole operation turning to mush.

The six products tested, reviewed, and compared to the Filet-O-Fish were chosen for their national availability at major supermarket chains — specifically, Walmart, Safeway, and Trader Joe's. Additionally, the stated makeup, appearance, and ingredients of those frozen fish products suggested that they would be similar to the main ingredient in a McDonald's Filet-O-Fish, which is composed of pollock formed into a square patty and then breaded and fried.

Each fish product tried and rated — some made with cod, others with haddock — was used as the centerpiece of a Filet-O-Fish copycat, assembled in the same manner and order as the McDonald's original product. The fish was cooked according to the manufacturer's recommended directions on the packaging (or estimated if that specific method was not listed) in an air fryer to a point where it was done on the inside and crispy, golden brown on the outside. (The plastic tray-based Stouffer's meal was prepared in an oven.) It was then placed inside a prepared hamburger-style bun with American cheese (perfect for melting) and a moderately large dollop of tartar sauce.

Immediately after photographing each sandwich, The Takeout taste-tested each item, comparing it to a freshly purchased and prepared McDonald's Filet-O-Fish. Factors such as taste, texture, and overall similarity to the name-brand product were the main considerations in deciding if the made-at-home sandwiches could make for a reasonable substitute.