Fish heads are most often despised by mistresses and ruthlessly thrown out. This is completely wrong, because it is from them that you can cook a delicious soup - rich, thick, fat. Experienced fishermen always make broth from heads, fins and even scales.
Pick your recipe
The best fish for cooking transparent broth is considered pike perch, ruff, perch, whitefish. Tasty soup is also obtained from asp, carp, carp, chub, rudd. Sea fish are also suitable - for example, cod, halibut, macrorus and others. From the heads of sturgeon, beluga, salmon, nelma, stellate sturgeon, you can cook very fatty and rich soup.
It is believed that the ear will be tastier if it is cooked from 2-3 varieties of fish.
In addition to heads, trimmed fins, tails, skin along with scales are used for cooking broth, in rare cases, milk. The tripe and intestines are considered waste material, especially since many fish (especially river and pond) have various parasites.
Sliced fish heads need to be thoroughly washed and gills removed. Gills give bitterness when cooking, so it is advisable to cut them immediately. Then lay your heads in cold water and put on the stove. If they are frozen, you do not need to defrost them, otherwise you can lose some of the taste properties. Throwing meat into boiling water will also be a mistake, as it will boil unevenly. Do not allow too much boiling, it is better to cook on low heat. Traditionally, fish soup is cooked in enameled or clay pots.
Cooking time depends on the type of fish. The small heads of sea fish will boil much faster than large pieces of river fish. It is important to remember: the total time for heat treatment of fish should not be less than 20 minutes, since only under these conditions all parasites completely die.
To make the broth more fragrant and useful, various roots are added to it, for example, carrots, onions, horseradish, celery, etc. It is not necessary to chop them carefully, since they will still be separated from the broth along with fish residues. 5 minutes before the end of cooking, you can add red and black pepper, bay leaf and other spices.
Ready broth should be carefully filtered through a sieve or gauze. In general, the contents of fish heads are quite edible, but not everyone decides to add it to their diet.
Based on the resulting aromatic and rich broth, you can cook any soup. Traditionally, potatoes and eggs are added to the ear, fish and cabbage, rice, pearl barley or barley grits go well. To make the broth golden, you can put carrots with onions in it. Sauerkraut boiled until half-cooked or pickled cucumbers stewed in a pan with onions are sometimes added to the broth of fatty fish. Thanks to such "highlights", the soup becomes slightly sour and resembles a pickle.
To enhance the aroma of fish soup, fishermen add 50 g of vodka to the prepared soup.
Some housewives separately in a pan stew large pieces of fish or other meat and add it to the soup or to the plate before serving. You can cook meat directly in the broth from the heads - the main thing is not to digest it, otherwise it will become harsh and less sweet. For children, it is better to cook fish in advance and carefully separate the meat from the bones, then put it in the soup. At the end of cooking, or right on the plate, you can chop the greens: dill, parsley or celery.