It is easy to spoil the taste of fish if you make mistakes when preparing the product for heat treatment. How to properly cleanse, gut and prepare fish for frying or boiling?
To make boiled or fried fish tasty, you need to properly prepare the product for heat treatment. A few useful tips will help you avoid mistakes, as well as save time and effort.
- Before cleaning fish scales, place the carcass in cold water to check how fresh it is. If the carcass of the fish is drowning - the fish is fresh, if it comes up - think carefully, maybe it is worth refusing to eat this extremely suspicious product altogether.
- Let the fish "get wet" in cold water in order to dissolve the blood, mucus, and sludge particles, if they are present on the fish carcass, settle to the bottom of the container with water.
- To remove the strong fishy smell, the fish can be kept in cold water by adding a few drops of vinegar and a spoonful of salt.
- Salted fish is also poured with cold water, so that it is easier to peel it when it is saturated with water and slightly swells.
- If the fish is slippery, salt will help: just dip your fingers in table salt and the fish will stop slipping out of your hands.
- Large fish with strong scales are difficult to clean. To facilitate the process, you need to lower the carcass in boiling water for a few seconds, then in warm water with the addition of vinegar.
- It is easier to remove the hard skin from the fish if you spray the carcass with vinegar and let it lie down for 10 minutes to half an hour.
- You can clean the scales with a grater or fish scaler, under a stream of cold running water.
- You can also clean the fish with a regular grater in running water.
- When cleaning the fish, it is necessary to cover the drain hole of the kitchen sink with a special filter (grate) to prevent scales or other parts from getting into the pipes and clogging them.
- The skin of the fish is removed, starting to peel it from the dorsal fin down to the abdomen, and finally to the tail.
- The scales are cleaned, starting from the tail - to the head, not forgetting to scrape the belly, where the scales are small, hard and almost invisible.
- When cleaning flounder and glossy fish, it is imperative to remove the skin on the "dark" side, it is this that is the source of the pungent fishy odor.
- You can get rid of the smell of mud by placing it in cold water with the addition of salt and soda for half an hour or an hour before cooking.
- The fins and tail can be cut off with large scissors.
- The gills are removed by "breaking" them out of the fish's head.
- The insides of large fish are removed by ripping open the belly of the fish along the carcass. If there is caviar or milk in the belly, they are separated from the intestines, dipped in cold, slightly salted water and then cooked according to their taste.
- It is possible to remove the insides of small fish by cutting off the head without ripping open the belly of the fish. To do this, a deep incision is made along the line of the gills, the spine is broken in this place and the head of the fish is removed along with the giblets.
- When removing the insides of large and medium-sized fish, you need to be especially careful to remove the liver so as not to crush the gallbladder. The fish meat will instantly turn bitter. If such a nuisance happens, you should immediately rinse the fish with cold water, rub with coarse salt, leave for 10-15 minutes, then rinse thoroughly with cold water.
- The fish, which are going to be fried, must be cut and salted 15 minutes before frying - then it will not "fall apart".
- Large fish can be marinated before heat treatment, but it is not worth keeping in the marinade for longer than 15-20 minutes, you can spoil the taste of the fish.
Correct and thorough preparation of fish products for heat treatment will save you from the hassle of cooking, and the prepared dishes will not disappoint with their taste.
