How to deliciously fry breaded loaches
Since the fish, when the reservoir dries out, burrows into the silt to great depths in anticipation of better times, the meat can taste like mud. To eliminate this, the fish is kept for 40-50 minutes under cold running water. At the same time, the mucus will be removed. Then lightly scrape the carcasses with a knife, gut them if desired, and cut off the heads.
Preparation
To remove the swamp smell half an hour before cooking, you can do one of the following:
In these cases, pre-soaking the loach does not make sense.
If the heads are not removed, the meat may taste bitter. Although not everyone agrees with this statement, there is absolutely no point in taking risks.
Carcasses prepared in one way or another can be breaded and fried in oil, like capelin. To do this you will need:
Cooking method
If the fish was not salted during preparation, this should be done before breading. Then roll in flour and fry in well-heated oil on all sides. You can do the opposite - fry first, then salt.
For breading, in addition to flour, use:
For larger loaches, you can use double or triple breading. First, the fish is rolled in a flour mixture, then in melange (scrambled egg) with salt, and in the second, a final dipping in breadcrumbs is added.
If you don’t want to bother with every carcass, then do the following:
All this beauty is poured with egg melange, 2 minutes after turning over and sprinkled with herbs.
Another cooking recipe is to fry the loach in the form of a kebab on skewers. To do this you will need a grill pan and the following ingredients:
First, put the coarsely chopped onion in a cup, remove the mucus, entrails, heads from the carcasses and divide into parts depending on the size of the fish. Send them to the bow. Add spices to taste, add vinegar, oil, stir and leave for 20 minutes.
Then coarsely chop the vegetables and assemble the kebabs, threading the products onto skewers in the following sequence:
You can add more vegetables between fish pieces, combining 2-3 at once. Prepared kebabs should be fried in a dry grill pan on all sides or baked in the oven. Serve with remaining greens.
Cutting
- Wet your hand and sprinkle with salt, this will make it convenient to hold this fish.
- Clean the scales, then gut them. The sequence of actions is explained by the fact that the fish is quite small and when it has not yet been gutted it is easier to clean off the scales
- Rinse and soak in brine
The most interesting thing is that soaking in brine is recommended in any case, even if you don’t plan to barbecue. Only if prepared differently can it be soaked in milk to remove the smell of mud. When you plan to cook shish kebab, it is recommended to soak it in lemon juice.
Loach fish stewed with vegetables
This recipe is prepared in a deep frying pan or in the oven. Required:
You can take a store-bought sauce, for example, “Krasnodarsky”. Or prepare it yourself by mixing paste, salt, sugar, vinegar, pepper and other spices - to taste.
Preparation consists of several steps:
An interesting taste is obtained if you add 2-3 blackcurrant leaves at the end of cooking. From the spices you can add bay leaf, parsley root and allspice. If the carcasses are long, it is convenient to cut them into 2-3 parts.
In France, loach is considered a delicacy if it has been soaked in red wine and then fried or boiled. In Germany, this fish is boiled in table vinegar or beer.
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Cooking shish kebab
Squeeze fresh lemon juice, it is recommended to add sugar to the juice and soak the loach in this brine. The fact is that the fillet of this fish itself is quite sweet, but if you soak it in sweet lemon juice, you get a rather piquant taste.
It is recommended to marinate fish by first cutting off the heads and tails, and moreover, cutting them into pieces across the body. It is recommended to add hot red pepper (pepper to taste) to the marinade.
The shish kebab is prepared on thin, sharp skewers. Some people use knitting needles after making “notches” on them so that the meat does not dangle on the skewers during cooking. This is done because thin wooden skewers easily burn out when held over coals.
Read: Spring roach. How to pickle and dry
A similar kebab was served to the table of emperors in Asia, the piquancy of this dish is in its taste. The point is that it produces a rich, tangy-sweet flavor. Nowadays it is recommended to eat it with fresh tomatoes, this makes it easier to tolerate the taste of hot pepper for those who don’t like spicy food.
Fried Loach
Recently, when I opened the door to Oleg, who had returned from the market, I saw a sly glint in his eyes and immediately realized that he had bought something very unusual. Something that you can use to make a delicious dish and share the recipe with you.
When we began to sort out the purchases we had brought, Oleg took out a bag with some small oblong fish and solemnly announced that he had bought snakes. I almost dropped a cassette of eggs on the floor)))) Of course, there were no snakes in the bag, it turned out to be the freshest loach fish, the recipe for which will be discussed.
After we ate all the fish, I decided to read about it on the Internet. Personally, I liked two facts about loaches that I want to tell you about. Firstly, they are called a living barometer for their high sensitivity to bad weather - when bad weather approaches, the fish begins to fuss and constantly poke its head out of the water. Secondly, in hot, dry weather, when rivers or lakes completely dry up, loaches burrow into them to a depth of 1-2 meters and hibernate, waiting for better times.
We decided not to bother and fry the catch brought by Oleg the way we usually cook capelin - roll in flour and fry in hot oil. If you find large loaches, you can cut off the heads and gut the carcasses. If the fish is small, like ours, then you can fry it whole. By the way, when you put loaches in hot oil, some of the fish curl up into a ring very coolly and then look original on a shared plate.
As you can see, there is nothing complicated in the recipe for fried loaches. The most labor-intensive part of the cooking process is to thoroughly rinse the fish and get rid of mucus on the skin.
Although our dish looks similar to fried capelin, the taste is completely different. Loach meat is incredibly tasty; it somehow reminded us of tuna or mackerel. Due to its dense structure, fish does not absorb much oil when fried, so it is not too greasy.
Ingredients:
How to cook loaches:
Step 1
It rinses the fish very well with running water, getting rid of mucus on the skin of the loaches. If desired, the carcasses can be beheaded and gutted.
Step 2
Pour the flour into a plate and salt it to taste. Heat vegetable oil in a frying pan.
Step 3
Wash the cherry tomatoes and cut them into halves.
Step 4
Dip the fish in flour and fry in hot oil on both sides until beautifully golden brown.
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Appearance
Let's start describing the appearance of the loach fish. First of all, it is distinguished by an elongated streamlined body, reminiscent of a snake. The body length ranges from 10 to 30 centimeters, and the weight barely reaches 100 grams. The average life expectancy is about 10 years.
Another name for the loach fish is the squeak, because when caught it makes a squeaking sound and wriggles. The scales are extremely smooth or completely absent, the body is covered with a thick layer of mucus, so catching bindweed is problematic. The fish is unable to swim at depth for a long time, so it has to cover the distance in short bursts.
The head is small, elongated forward, the eyes are small yellow, and there are small antennae near the mouth. Has no teeth. The dorsal fin is short, located closer to the tail of the fish.
The standard color is brown with dark markings. The ventral part is usually light yellow in color. The color of the scales depends on several factors: water quality, habitat and soil type. Albino loaches, which have completely white scales, live in some areas, but they are almost impossible to catch.
Let's start describing the external differences of fish by gender. It is not difficult to distinguish females from males, since the former look much larger in weight and body length. Males also have elongated, pointed pectoral fins.
Habitat and enemies
The loach is a fairly common species, so it is found in areas of Eurasia, East and South Asia. A very large amount of fish is found in France, but you can catch it in the Ural Mountains. The squeak lives mainly in silty soils, where there is mud, so that it is comfortable to hide and spend the winter. Prefers freshwater bodies of water where there is no fast current (ditches, swampy creeks, muddy channels, stagnant lakes). Loaches usually sleep during the day and only go out to hunt at night.
Larger fish can be considered natural enemies of the loach:
Fishermen often use loach pulp to catch larger fish. Its natural enemies are excellent candidates for such bait.
Is it eaten?
In Japan, bindweed is a safe, edible delicacy that will cost you a pretty penny. These representatives of the loach family are grown in special nurseries, so there is no need to worry about their taste properties.
In our country, it is necessary to treat the caught prey with caution, since the loach can cause a lot of problems during cooking. You must first protect yourself and ensure that the fish is caught in a clean environment free of intestinal parasites. Before cooking, it is better to heat treat it. This fish is specific and can cause an allergic reaction in humans.
Loach fish meat is dietary, very tender, slightly sweet. Before cooking, we strongly recommend marinating it in beer or vinegar. Squeaker is usually used as an appetizer, homemade sprats, baked or simply fried in a frying pan.
Interesting Facts
There are a lot of strange facts about the loach family that will be of interest to the reader, so it’s worth telling about them in more detail.
- Aquarium loaches are able to predict changes in the atmosphere. So, at low atmospheric pressure they rush around in the aquarium, hit its walls, and try to get out of the water.
- These fish are not picky about their habitat; they can even live in swamps and ditches.
- These individuals have phenomenal vitality. They are able to starve for six months without loss of vitality.
- Due to the development of the circulatory system, squeaks are able to breathe not only through their gills, but also through their skin and intestinal walls. Therefore, it is not difficult for them to live for several days without water.
- When a reservoir dries out, fish can bury themselves in holes at the bottom and wait for better times.
- Bindweed is capable of crawling across wet grass from one body of water to another.
Knowing these unusual facts will make it easy for you to show off your deep knowledge to fishermen, friends, family or neighbors.
Loaches and others
Photo by the author
In my stories I often mention the river of my childhood, Sendega, in the Kostroma region. We all come from childhood, so now I’ll start with it. This fast and clean forest river flows near the village of Semenkovo, across the bridge from which there was a pioneer camp, where I spent a month every summer until the fifth grade.
The river was full of bleak and minnows, which were easily caught with a fishing rod to the delight of us kids. But it was difficult to catch more serious fish; this was done by the guys from the senior squads. Once a week, fishing competitions were even held among them, the winners received a pie with jam, and fish soup was made from the catch for the fishermen.
On Sendeg, not far from the camp, there was a small wooden dam, which accumulated water for a whole week, releasing the bare minimum. I don’t know why this was done... But every Saturday evening the dam completely discharged its accumulated water. Sendega became stormy, muddy and overflowed its usual banks for several hours. It was at these hours that high school fishermen began to take part in their competitions, because in this stream perches and large roaches began to be caught en masse, from which fish soup was then cooked. Behind the fishermen there was a steep grassy bank, on which spectators were seated, as in an amphitheater. I was a regular spectator there.
And then one day several fishermen at once shouted to the judges-counselors, and the most curious ones ran after them, including me... In the hands and on the hooks of three guys, light snakes wriggled into a finger with a thickness and length of 7 to 10 cm. The guys were perplexed , they say, there were vines, but they will be counted towards them, or something. The judges said that the loaches counted. But when the fishermen wanted to throw them into the pan with the rest of the fish, the counselors did not allow this, saying that loaches are inedible(!). This stuck in my memory for many years. Much later, I learned that residents of the Astrakhan and Volgograd regions before the war and about ten years after it, when they caught sturgeon in their nets, threw away their caviar as inedible, because it looked like frog caviar. Until now, on the same Volga and Don, residents of distant farms do not eat delicious lampreys if they catch them. True, they got used to selling them to resellers when they were nearby.
River eel is revered all over the world as one of the kings of fish gastronomy, along with sturgeon and salmon. This tireless wanderer and explorer spawns in the Sargasso Sea of the Atlantic Ocean, then feeds in all the freshwater bodies of this ocean basin, wherever it can swim or even crawl through the wet grass on land, and then return to the Sargasso Sea, spawn and die. Small eels always penetrated from the reservoirs of the Baltic states into the rivers and lakes near Tver, rolled there and into the Volga, but did not go further, returning back, having matured. But in 1935, the Volga-Baltic Canal began operating, creating a free and convenient passage for the Baltic aquatic fauna. And the Volga then had no dams. And before the war and immediately after it, thick “snakes” of a meter in size began to fall into the nets of Caspian fishermen, which crawled dashingly along the ground, did not give in to their hands and, no matter how early, continued to move until they were cut in half. The eels caused quite a stir, but it never even occurred to anyone that they could and should be eaten. This continued until the appearance of the Volga dams, because of which there were no Baltic eels in the lower reaches of the river.
