Smoked eel: where to buy, how to cook and with what to use?

2024 Author: Isabella Gilson | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:14

Smoked eel is a wonderful gourmet delicacy. Any good restaurant will offer this fish as an amazing main course or in tandem with other ingredients in a salad. In addition to excellent taste, this product has excellent nutritional value. Smoked eel is also useful, its meat contains iodine, potassium, iron and other minerals necessary for the body, vitamins E, A. How to cook this wonderful fish, where to buy and what foods are best combined with? We will look for answers to all questions.

Where is smoked eel sold in the capital?

Moscow is a huge metropolis. In this city you can find any product, even the most scarce one. Smoked eel is stored on the shelves in grocery stores along with other types of fish. It is still better to look for it in supermarkets, since this outlandish one is unlikely to be found in small private stores.product. If the price of smoked eel seems too high for you or you don’t want to waste time looking, you can try to make this culinary masterpiece yourself. It will turn out no worse than the store!

Cooking by ourselves

If you have a smokehouse at home, it's a sin not to use it to cook eel. Immediately before the start of the process, the fish must be prepared. The eel should be well washed and cleaned, absolutely all the insides should be gutted. After that, it is advisable to once again lower the fish into the water, after treating it with s alt. Before you start smoking eel, you need to pickle it for a short period of time. This will help a special brine. To prepare it, you only need water (based on 5 kg of fish - 6-7 l) and s alt (1 kg). Fish in such a brine should be kept for no more than 10 minutes, and if the pieces are small and thin, then half the time should be spent. After this, the eel should be thoroughly washed and then dried. Now the matter is small - we make a fire in the smokehouse, warm it up to a temperature of no more than 80 degrees. It is this indicator of the thermometer that needs to be maintained throughout the entire process of preparing the eel, and this will take 1-1.5 hours, depending on the size and thickness of the pieces. You can also smoke this fish using a barbecue grill. When using this cooking method, the eel will turn out to be less greasy. It should be noted that firewood from fruit trees or oak is more suitable for smoking. It is better not to use conifers - they will give the fish a bitter taste.taste.

What goes with smoked eel?

Recipes provide various variations of dishes with this delicious fish. For the inexperienced, smoked eel with brown bread and onions will seem the best dish. This product is often used as a filling for sushi. It is most delicious to eat this fish with vegetables, fruits, salads, flour products. Smoked eel is a high-calorie and completely independent product, it should play the first violin in any dish. Therefore, you should not combine it with heavy foods that have an unusual taste. There should be only one accent on the plate.

Salad with smoked eel

There are a lot of recipes, and the first one, which we will tell you about, is the simplest and most unpretentious. To prepare a dish such as a salad with smoked eel, you will need smoked eel itself (300 g), 2 cucumbers, red bell pepper, lemon juice, any lettuce leaves, vegetable oil (preferably olive) and s alt. Vegetables should be cut into strips, like fish. Lettuce leaves should be torn into small, easy-to-eat pieces. Mix all the ingredients, add dressing and spices, s alt. You can decorate the dish with sesame seeds.

The second version of the salad has a claim to gourmet love. The list of necessary products includes smoked eel (350 g), Beijing cabbage, a few pine nuts, a little more than half a glass of prunes, olive oil, juice of one lemon, cognac (1 tbsp.), Mustard (half a teaspoon) and apples (2 small ones). Cut the fish into stripschop vegetables, add dried fruits. Now let's start making the sauce. To do this, mix oil, lemon juice, mustard and cognac. Peeled and chopped apples should be added last so that they do not turn black. Dress the salad and serve immediately. You can decorate the dish with pomegranate or herbs. Do not forget that the delicacy salad is served in small portions. Bon appetit!