Now buying salty or dried fish has become much more expensive than some five or six years ago. When you come to the market or to the store, you catch yourself thinking: “But should I drink beer with dried fish?” And then you go to the counter, look at the price and understand that one fish can not do, and two is already expensive to buy. So return home with nothing. But now, thanks to this article, you will learn how to salt fish for drying or drying.
Primary requirements
Before drying or drying the fish, you need to decide what kind of salting it should be. Now we’ll talk about how much salt to fish for drying, and you can independently make this charm at home or in the country. If the fish contains ten percent of the salt, then it is considered salted, from twenty and above - very salty. Tuzluk (the juice secreted by fish mixed with salt) is periodically drained to prevent bacteria from multiplying and spoiling the fish. Fish for drying or drying must always be fresh and chilled. Only then can one proceed to gutting. Salting fish for drying is a very responsible matter. It is necessary to gut the insides so that the germs do not get on the meat.
Salting small fish
For salting small fish, a barrel or an enamel pan is considered ideal. In order to salt the fish for drying, you need to wash it and grate it with a special mixture of saltpeter and salt. The proportion for such a mixture is 10: 1. Saltpeter is an excellent preservative. She does not allow products to deteriorate and gives them a beautiful reddish tint. Lay out on the bottom of the barrel or pan: fish - the mixture, cover and put under oppression. Keep the container in a cool place. If you suddenly did not have nitrate, then the recipe for salting fish for drying is a little complicated. In this case, you have to gut the fish and remove the gills. Various spices can be added to the pickle to taste: currant leaves, blackberries, bay leaf, cloves, black, allspice, caraway seeds and even rosemary. It all depends on your preference. After salting, the fish can be dried, or you can eat like that by washing with water and watering with sunflower oil.
Fish processing
In order to properly gut the fish, you need to make a transverse incision between the head and the anus. You can not cut it in the opposite direction, since with such an incision, internal organs can be damaged. Pull out the insides, gills, rinse thoroughly. Rinse until there is no blood under the spine.
How to salt fish for drying or curing wet
For drying, choose not very large fish up to half a kilogram. In the hot season, you need to gut, in the cold - no. You do not need to wash the fish, just wipe it with a dry towel to remove excess moisture. For cooking, be sure to take coarse salt. Any other will not work, as our goal is not to give the fish a taste, but to remove moisture from it. Such fish, salted for drying, will have a great smell and taste. The only disadvantage of coarse salt is that it slowly dissolves, but absorbs more moisture.
Next, we do this: in a bucket or basin (if there is neither one or the other, you can take a pot), pour salt, but not very much. The fish should be laid out so that the head of one touches the tail of the other. Each layer is well salted. After the fish is over, you need to pour so much salt on it so that it covers the entire surface. You can add a little sugar for taste. Cover and put under oppression. The harder the yoke, the tastier the fish will be. It does not allow air to leak into the tank and prevents the growth of bacteria. After about 5 hours, the fish releases its juice - brine. It must be kept as cool as possible, even on ice.
How much to salt the fish for drying or drying? Salt in this way needs about two to three days. After this time, the meat becomes gray in a well-salted fish. The next step will be the preparation for stringing and hanging. Salted fish should be soaked under running water until it begins to float. Fish is hung out in the following way: special hooks are threaded through the eye and hung on a rope. The fish should dry after soaking, so it is better to hang it at night so that the flies do not hinder your catch. In the morning, to scare away the flies, the fish is sprayed with a solution of vinegar and water. Drying or drying lasts up to eight days, it all depends on the fish size.
Salting fish for drying or dry-curing
How to salted fish for drying in a dry way and which fish is more suitable for this? There are answers to these questions. Salting fish for drying or drying in this way is more suitable for large fish. With wet salting, we did not cut the fish, then we needed to not only take out the entrails, but also divide the fish into two halves and wipe it with a dry towel. Sprinkle the inside well with salt. For such salting, fish are laid in layers in a box. It is best to take a wooden one - the juice secreted by the fish will flow out through the holes. The box must be placed in a pit. They usually dig it out in the shade and cover it with a film so that insects can not get to the fish. The ambassador lasts up to a week. This method is also suitable for pickling small fish. You can’t even gut it.
Here's what you need to do for this:
1) Take a chopping board, put a clean towel on it.
2) Put the fish in a row according to the type of "sprats in a jar."
3) Sprinkle with salt and wrap in a towel.
4) Cover with another board and put oppression.
Juice with such salting flows through the tissue. After the fish has salted, it is taken out of the towel, washed in cold water, briefly soaked and hung out. The best drying method is a wooden box prepared in advance with gauze or mesh walls, but you can do this in a simple way. We take a "gypsy" or shoe needle, pass a kapron thread or fishing line through it, and string fish, threading the thread through the eye holes. We put gauze or a mosquito net on top of the rope and dry for seven to ten days. Large fish are best hung at high altitude in the poles.
Drying and drying fish in nature
Many people wonder how to salt fish for drying in nature. If you went on a picnic with friends for a couple of days and caught fish, you can safely dry it or wither it right on the spot. How to salt fish for drying in camping conditions? The gutted catch is placed in a bag of salt for a day, and then hang out in the fresh air. You can fix the fish with clothespins, hanging them by the tails in the fresh air. The most acceptable weather for this is windy. To protect against insects, the fish is wrapped with gauze and wiped with sunflower oil or a solution of manganese. The optimum temperature for drying or drying is up to twenty degrees. In the natural environment, the fish dries up to two weeks. It is better to store dried fish in a cloth bag in a ventilated place, but it should be noted that after drying it should be “infused” for up to a month.
How to pickle a fresh fish? Cold pickling
For pickling small fish, it is not necessary to gut it; for large, this condition is necessary. There are two types of pickling fish: cold and hot.
1. Prepare the marinade: 200 milliliters of water, 100 grams of salt, 200 grams of sugar. Mix and dissolve in 300 milliliters of boiling water.
2. Cool.
3. Pour 500 ml of vinegar and boiled water into the brine.
4. Add one gram of bay leaf, one gram of dill, three grams of pepper, better than allspice, one and a half grams of mustard in grains.
5. Put the dishes with the fish in the refrigerator for five days, pre-shift the onion rings and pour the marinade (1: 1). The onion turns out no less tasty than the fish itself.
Hot pickling
1. Cut the fish into pieces, after removing the insides.
2. Pour fine salt and put in the cold for 30 minutes.
3. For the marinade: boil two liters of water, add four onions and three chopped carrots.
4. After ten minutes of boiling add two tablespoons of vinegar, pepper, bay leaf, salt, sugar to taste.
5. Pour the marinade over the fish and cook for twenty minutes over low heat.
6. Scald the cans, lay the fish there and pour the marinade.
7. Close with a plastic cover.
You can store the fish for up to three days in the refrigerator.
Delicious salty balych
Well, who doesn’t like fish damsels? It is not only tasty, but also healthy. Balyk can be made from oily fish: sturgeon, salmon, trout and others.
Cooking method:
1. Separate the back from the skin, fold it into a pan.
2. Sprinkle with salt and nitrate (400 grams of salt per 5 grams of nitrate).
3. Put under oppression for three days.
4. Stir the beams, rubbing with your own juice, and leave for another three days.
5. Take out, hang in the sun for drying.
6. Smoke or grate with liquid smoke.
Keep the fish right
Fish products deteriorate very quickly, and the fish smell is strongly absorbed by neighboring products. For this reason, fresh fish should be stored in an enameled bowl with a lid. You can keep it in this form for only two days. Frozen fish can be stored for up to two weeks. The salty product is kept in the refrigerator at a temperature of up to 12 degrees. Sun-dried and dried are stored in the refrigerator in paper or a rag bag. If you have fish in barrels of brine, you need to store it in a cold basement. Put a barrel on bricks, and fill up the floor with sawdust. Sawdust should be changed often in the winter (about once a week), in the summer - once every two weeks.
We hope that this article was informative for you, and you will certainly become a professional in pickling, drying and drying fish.