A properly cooked fish soup is an incredibly tasty and aromatic dish that can replace even the most rich meat soups. Modern chefs have gone further and prepare this soup not only from fish, but also with the addition of seafood, various vegetables and other ingredients. So from which fish can you make the most delicious fish soup?
Valuable fish species
Ever since tsarist times, when fish soup was also called "gravy" and "slurry", this dish was divided into ordinary and festive varieties. The latter was also called "red fish soup" and "old-style fish soup", and for its preparation they used valuable varieties of fish: sturgeon, stellate sturgeon, beluga and salmon. Such a dish had a very appetizing amber color, and an additional aroma was given to it then, imported from distant countries, and now universally available saffron.
If you cannot afford buying whole fish from the Sturgeon or Salmon family, there is a fairly acceptable way out - you can buy so-called fish offal. They are the ones needed to cook fish soup, and the rest of the fish - only for additional "thick" in the dish. Fatty and rich by-products include fish head, tail and abdominal trimmings. But even here there are some nuances of cooking. For example, you need to very carefully clean your head, since the presence of gills in it can impart excessive and completely unnecessary bitterness to a ready-made dish.
An excellent option is also a combination of sturgeon and salmon offal in one dish. Such a fish soup can become a real festive dish worthy of literally a royal table. If you managed to purchase sturgeon offal, then be sure to peel the fish pieces from the skin, as it can also give the dish a not very pleasant taste.
Other options for cooking fish soup
Almost all types of fish that can be caught in Russian rivers are suitable for this dish: ruffs, whitefish, perches, pike perch, tench, burbot, catfish, ide, rudd, chubs, carp, asp, bream and many others. In this case, again, it is better to combine several varieties in one dish, since each of them gives the soup its own peculiarity. For example, it is believed that ruffs and perches impart stickiness to a dish, and burbot - sweetness.
If at least 3 varieties of fish are used in the preparation of fish soup, then it is called "combined", and in the old days, not only the one that was cooked from "noble" raw materials was revered as a delicious soup, but also the dish, which was prepared using small river fish.
But in general, for almost all variations, there are the same rules - in no case can you cook whole fish, it must be gutted, washed and cleaned of scales; it is necessary to filter the broth after cooking; onions and carrots should be added to the broth at the stage of its preparation, which will give the liquid a pleasant aroma and not a cloudy color.
