Many gourmet fish dishes are a delight. Low-calorie and healthy, fish-made delicacies also have an excellent delicate taste. The stewed fish in sour cream has a particularly soft, juicy and slightly sour taste. This simple and at the same time refined dish is easy to prepare even for a novice hostess.
Any fish is suitable for this purpose: pollock, pink salmon, carp, catfish. The only thing you should think about in advance is whether you want to extract fish bones during the meal. In case you are not too picky or intend to stew fish until the moment when the bones are separated from the meat, then you can use any fish. If you decide that bone extraction is not your favorite pastime, then it is better to use fish containing a small amount of bone or to use fillet.
So, for starters, carcasses should be cut: clean them of scales, remove heads, fins and tails and rinse thoroughly. Then the fish is cut into portioned pieces or cleaned of the ridge and costal bones. True, if you want to impress your guests with the beauty of the dish, then you can cook whole carcasses. But in this case, do not forget that the cooking time will increase significantly.
Then prepare the onion: cut it into small or large pieces (depending on desire and taste preferences) and fry in vegetable oil for several minutes. Sometimes carrots are grated on a coarse grater. In this case, the overall taste of the dish becomes more sweet. It is better to fry carrots simultaneously with onions for about five minutes over medium heat. Do not forget to stir the mass all the time to avoid burning. Then water is added to the resulting mixture and stewed for another fifteen minutes. At the end, many also add tomato paste. After that, put prepared fish in this mass. In order for the stewed fish in sour cream to have a firmer consistency at the end of cooking, it should also be slightly fried. Therefore, slightly increase the heat and fry it for about five minutes until slightly whitened on both sides.
At this point, the first stage of cooking can be considered completed, provided that you are a healthy person who just loves fish dishes. However, fish with sour cream, among other things, can be one of the main diet dishes. Therefore, if you or your family is contraindicated in fried, then you can do without this stage.
In this case, you should just chop the onions and fish and grate the carrots. All this (raw or fried) is poured with water or fish broth and, of course, sour cream. It is worth remembering that stewed fish in sour cream is a dish that does not have any special subtleties in cooking, so you should not spend time on special preparation of the broth for pouring - you can do with water.
By the way, some cooks consider water an unnecessary ingredient and advise using only sour cream as a fill. However, stewed fish in sour cream runs the risk of being burnt if you decide to stew it in a mixture of a thick consistency. Therefore, it is better to fill in the water first and put out the fish for about fifteen minutes (depending on the type of fish and the size of the pieces), then add sour cream and simmer for about twenty minutes. Salt, pepper and other spices are usually added simultaneously with water. After the pan is removed from the heat, the dish is usually kept under the lid for about half an hour, so that the fish can soak in the aroma and taste of the fill and spices.
Do not forget that it is possible to add some additional ingredients to such a classic dish as fish in sour cream. The recipe can be changed according to your preferences and the products at hand.
Enjoy your meal.