Quite often, residents of apartment buildings have to decide how to dry fish on the balcony. This work is delicate and requires certain skills and knowledge, because without experience, you can easily ruin the final product and your mood. To prevent this from happening, you need to know some subtleties.
If you decide to pamper yourself with a self-made ram, use only fresh river or sea fish for this, from the catch of which no more than a day has passed, otherwise the dried fish will be of poor quality.
Preparing fish for drying
Before you dry your fish on the balcony, be sure to prepare it. All this is done in several stages:
- treatment;
- salting;
- soaking.
Treatment
During processing, it is necessary to sort the carcasses by size, since each weight requires its own salting time. Then gut it thoroughly. You can salt the fish without cutting, when there is caviar inside, and you really want to preserve it. In these cases, use a syringe to pour a strong saline solution into the fish belly through the mouth. For large carcasses, cut along the back to help dry it.
Salting
During salting, you need to remove excess moisture from the fish. To do this, you need to sprinkle it well with salt, not only on top, but also inside (about 1.5 kilograms of salt per 10 kilograms of fish). It is better to lay with a jack so that the laying is even. Put oppression on top at the rate of 150 grams per 1 kilogram of raw materials and take out to a cool place for 3-5 days. For oppression, you can take bricks, a jar or a bucket of water.
Soaking
At this stage, we remove excess salt from the fish and saturate it with liquid. We take out the carcasses from the brine and let them lie down for a while to distribute the salt evenly over the entire surface. We rinse well under the stream, then fill it with cold clean water and leave it for a while, periodically changing the liquid.
Fish drying process
We string the salted and washed fish on a fishing line, a thin rope, twine. You can use regular paper clips by hooking them over a fish lip. We hang copies of different sizes separately, as the drying time will be different. In large versions, for uniform drying, be sure to insert a toothpick into the abdomen. The fish should not touch.
We place the structure in the place of the balcony where it is dry and there is ventilation. The ideal temperature for drying is from +18 to 20 degrees. The whole process will take from 5 days to several weeks.
Protection from external factors
Do not expose the fish to direct sunlight, the heat will "cook" it and deprive it of fat. When the balcony is closed, then everything is fine. If it is open, then you will have to work on creating protection against annoying flies and insects. There are several ways:
- create protection from gauze or old tulle;
- dip the carcasses in a weak vinegar solution, grease with vegetable oil or sprinkle with lemon juice.
In addition, there should be no objects with a pronounced odor on the balcony, as the fish will absorb it.
