Smoked fish, tempting with its appetizing appearance and amazing smell, is considered one of the most popular and delicious snacks. Despite the fact that modern stores offer a fairly rich assortment of ready-made products, many lovers of this dish prefer to smoke fish on their own.
What types of fish are suitable for smoking
Almost any fish is suitable for smoking, but true gourmets still prefer such species as ide, burbot, river perch, trek, bream, capelin, carp, pike perch, tench and eel. All these species have dense scales, so their skin does not crack during heat treatment. Mackerel is considered ideal for smoking fish.
There are two ways to smoke fish: hot and cold. So, any of them can be chosen for cooking mackerel, beluga, herring, cod and sea bass. Horse mackerel, chum salmon, mullet, white fish, shemaya, sockeye salmon and chinook salmon are subject to extremely cold smoking. But stellate sturgeon, greenling, catfish, bream, pike perch, herring, whitefish, cod, flounder and pollock are best smoked using hot technology.
Rules for choosing fish for smoking
In addition to the type of fish, some other factors should be considered when smoking, such as the size of the product, its weight, the degree of freshness of the fish, etc.
Experienced fishermen recommend smoking exclusively fresh, or, as they also call it, snuffed fish. Although it is possible to smoke a frozen product, but only on condition that the freezing process proceeded very quickly, and the fish had never thawed before. Frozen fish, which is sold in stores, is completely unsuitable for smoking, because its quality is sometimes rather doubtful and completely incompatible with the rules of safe cooking.
Both large and small fish are suitable for smoking. The main thing is that the selected specimens are as bold as possible. Of course, it is desirable that fish of the same species and approximately the same size be smoked at the same time. In this case, it will be salted and smoked most evenly.
You do not need to gut fish weighing up to 400 g. It should simply be salted and then smoked whole. Breams and carps weighing less than 750 g are also smoked whole without being gutted. If the weight of the fish you have chosen varies from 1 to 3 kg, and you want to smoke it hot, it is better to clean the product from the entrails without touching the scales and leaving the head. When cold smoked, fish of medium size and weight need not be further processed.
Particularly large specimens must be gutted and divided into layers before smoking. It is advisable to divide such fish lengthwise into two halves so that for each part of the carcass there is half a tail and half a head.
Smoked fish can be stored for a long time. However, if you have prepared a lot of snacks, put it in the refrigerator, after folding the fish in layers and separating each copy from the next with a sheet of blank paper. It is impossible to use sealed containers for storing smoked fish, otherwise the snack will simply suffocate from its own vapors.
