Surprisingly tasty and no less useful mackerel fish are known to many only in the form of canned food in oil or in their own juice. But mackerel is one of those fish species that is almost always available in the fish departments of our stores in fresh-frozen form, and you can cook delicious dishes from it. One of them is mackerel stuffed and baked in foil.
There are many types of fillings with which you can stuff mackerel - it can be vegetables, and mushrooms, and spicy herbs, and minced meat from other fish, and even heard stuffed with sour berries.
I want to offer you a recipe for stuffed mackerel that any housewife can make, as it is very simple in its components, and, nevertheless, the fish turns out to be very tasty.
So, the mackerel stuffed, baked in foil
We take 1 large mackerel or a couple of smaller ones (the weight does not matter, just the more solid the fish, the more festive it looks). We defrost the fish, remove the gills, gut the carcass, removing all the films from the inside and cutting the ridge at the head and tail, carefully pulling it out from the inside (we do all the manipulations from the side of the belly), select the bones, wash the fish and dry it with a paper towel.
To bake fish with or without a head - anyone likes it, but with a head it always looks more elegant on the festive table. Next, you need to sprinkle the prepared carcass with seasoning for fish, which are on sale very much, and sprinkle with lemon juice. You can also prepare a marinating mixture using soy sauce with vegetable oil, plus the juice of half a lemon. And with all this, grate the carcass, let it soak for 15-20 minutes.
For the filling, therefore, the recipe we need a boiled egg, 50 grams of cheese (if you have one fish), mayonnaise, salt, pepper. Grate the egg and cheese, add the mayonnaise, salt, pepper, mix and stuff the well-prepared mackerel, stab the belly with toothpicks.
This recipe can be slightly modified by taking Druzhba processed cheese instead of regular hard cheese , in this case you can even not use an egg, just mix the grated cheese with black pepper (or with spicy additives, which also include pepper) and mayonnaise, and this stuffed mackerel, laying on top of the minced meat thin half-rings of lemon - also very gently obtained.
Stuffed mackerel gently wrapped in foil, sprinkled with vegetable oil, and baked in the oven in a fairly deep form, at a temperature of 190-200 degrees for about 20 minutes-half an hour.
Another of the simple fillings for stuffing mackerel, you can offer onions and carrots, passaged in vegetable oil. The amount here depends on the size of the fish; on average, one rather large carrot and a pair of medium-sized bulbs leave. Plus, a couple of spoons of semolina is added to the filling. Onions can be cut into cubes, or half rings if the bulbs are not large, and the carrots are passed through a coarse grater and in turn we put the onions and carrots in vegetable oil until cooked, without overcooking. Add semolina to this mixture, salt to taste, pepper, let cool and stuff the fish with vegetables. Fasten the abdomen with toothpicks, apply a thin layer of mayonnaise over the fish, wrap in foil, laid out in a baking dish, and send to the oven, also for half an hour. If you set the temperature above 190 degrees, then maybe in 20 minutes everything will already be perfectly baked. And if you want your fish to turn golden, then you need to open the foil and leave the fish for another 7-10 minutes in the oven.
Stuffed and baked mackerel in the oven looks great on the festive table, if you decorate it with lemon slices, thinly cutting it with rings, as well as bunches of fresh parsley or other favorite herbs. And be sure to spread a leaf of salad on the dish, you can add cherry tomato for brightness - it will look very elegant.
Try to cook - the stuffed mackerel is worth it, you won’t regret it!