Rotan cutlets - fish recipes

Cooking delicious rotan cutlets according to the chef's recipe

And so, the list of necessary ingredients for preparing rotan cutlets:

1. Rotan - 500 grams;

2. Potatoes - 1-2 pcs;
3. Onion - 1-2 pcs;
4. Garlic - 1 clove;
5. Butter - 25 grams;
6. Pork lard (or rendered pork fat) - 100 grams (25);
7. Egg - 2 pcs;
8. Flour (you can also use breadcrumbs for flour);
9. Greens to taste;
10. Spices to taste (black pepper, allspice, salt, seasonings for fish or cutlets).

Recipes for first and second courses

Other dishes can be prepared from minced meat:

1. Fish ears (dumplings). The minced meat is made the same as for cutlets, but boiled mushrooms are additionally added.
2. Fish balls. Minced meat is prepared from boiled fish. Separately, you need to prepare the puree. Minced meat and puree are mixed in equal parts, butter, spices and eggs are added. The resulting mixture is made into balls, rolled in breadcrumbs and fried.

In addition to cutlets, there are other rotan dishes, the recipes of which are quite simple.

Fish soups

Small fish are also great for fish soups; you can cook them directly with the head, removing the entrails and scales.

To prepare fish soup you will need:

• cleaned fish;
• 1 onion;
• spices (peppercorns, bay leaf);
• carrot;
• potato.

The rotan is placed in a pan and filled with water, chopped carrots, onions, peppers and bay leaves are added.
After boiling, add diced potatoes. You need to cook for about an hour over low heat. Fish soups are quite easy and fun to experiment with. If, after preparing the fish soup, you pour scrambled eggs into it (3 eggs per three-liter pan), you will get a completely different dish - soup with scrambled eggs. It is served with sour cream and pieces of boiled egg.

Chowder with cereal

You can prepare a soup with cereal. First you need to prepare the fish broth and strain it. The boiled fish is cleaned of bones, the fillets are placed back in the pan, then cereals (rice, pearl barley, buckwheat) are added and cooked until tender.

If you manage to catch large specimens, the bull can be cooked whole. Rotan is good both fried and baked.

In the oven with potatoes

To bake rotan you will need a suitable form.
In addition to fish, you will need potatoes, onions, eggs and sour cream. Before baking, the eggs are boiled and chopped. Onions, potatoes and fish are fried separately. The potatoes are cut into thin slices and the onion into rings. Fish carcasses are fried whole.

After this, I put half of the prepared potatoes in a mold, then put in fish and again potatoes with onions and boiled eggs, all of this is poured with sour cream. Seasonings are added to taste. Bake for 40 minutes.

In a frying pan, breaded

The largest specimens are suitable for frying. The carcasses are first rubbed with a mixture of pepper and salt, then rolled in breadcrumbs or flour. Fry in a well-heated frying pan, turning occasionally, until a crust forms. One of the signs of readiness is the separation of the bone from the meat.

Salads and snacks

In addition to first and second courses, you can prepare various types of pies, salads and snacks from rotans.
To prepare the salad, the fish must be boiled and the meat separated from the bones; the minced meat is made almost the same as when preparing rotan cutlets. Spices and onions are added to the meat, cleaned from bones. The remaining ingredients are chosen according to your taste; these can be green peas, boiled eggs, boiled potatoes and other vegetables. The recipe for rotan dishes is simple; they can be prepared at home, or directly from freshly caught fish while fishing.

Step-by-step recipe for making rotan cutlets

Stage I

At the first stage, we need to prepare minced meat from which we will make cutlets:

1. Cleaned and gutted fish are easily filleted. Very small rattans can be used for this whole (without the head and entrails, of course); their soft bones are easily ground in a meat grinder, although it is better to pass the fish through it twice!

2. Add butter to the ground fish and mix.
3. Grind lard (or simply add fat), potatoes, onions, squeeze out the garlic with a garlic press and mix everything thoroughly.

4. Beat in 1-2 eggs, add spices and breadcrumbs (or dried bread minced 1-2 tablespoons) and mix everything. Add breadcrumbs until a smooth consistency is formed, suitable for placing shaped pieces of minced meat - cutlets - into the frying pan.

Stage II

At the second stage of preparation, we carry out frying - the final stage of turning the minced meat into cutlets:

1. 
   Add flavored sunflower/olive oil to the frying pan, or a small piece of butter and pour in not yet flavored sunflower/olive oil.

2. Place our rotan cutlets on a heated frying pan, having first rolled them in flour, and fry for a few minutes from each frying pan until cooked.

3. 
   So our very tasty rotan cutlets are ready according to an interesting recipe.

So don’t neglect rotan in your catch, but find a culinary use for it.

Delicious minced rotan cutlets with lard: recipe with photos

Cooking time : 50 minutes

Number of servings: 6

Energy value

• calorie content – ​​177.5 kcal;
• proteins – 16.4 g;
• fats – 6.3 g;
• carbohydrates – 13.9 g.

Ingredients

• fish – 500 g;
• raw potatoes – 250 g;
• onion – 150 g;
• garlic – 1-2 cloves;
• butter – 25 g;
• lard or lard – 100 g;
• chicken egg – 2 pcs.;
• wheat flour – 4 tbsp;
• breadcrumbs - ½ cup;
• greens (parsley or dill) – 1 bunch;
• spices - to taste;
• salt - to taste;
• sunflower or olive oil – 50 ml.

Tip : before use, lard should be cut and placed in the freezer. In this state it grinds better.

Step-by-step preparation

• Large fish must be thinned. First of all, it is cleaned of scales. After this, the fish must be gutted and thoroughly washed with running water (permissible in a bowl, but in several passes). Now you can remove everything unnecessary: ​​fins, head and tail. It is easy to separate the flesh from the bones with a kitchen knife. Removing the fillet from small rattans is quite difficult. You don’t have to do this - small bones can be easily ground in a meat grinder or blender. But all other procedures are required.
• You grind the cleaned fish, but if it is mostly small, you need to do this twice to get rid of the bones.
• Add butter to the resulting minced meat and mix, but if it is from the refrigerator, it is easier to melt it.
• Peel 1-2 onions (depending on size), potatoes and grind them together with lard. Press 1-2 cloves of garlic through a press and mix all the ingredients with the fish.
• Now you can move on to the final stage of preparing the minced meat. Beat two eggs into it, add finely chopped herbs, flour, add salt to taste and finally knead by hand. You add spices here at your own discretion. Rotan is a unique fish and does not particularly need flavor enhancers.
• Place a frying pan on the stove and fill its bottom with vegetable oil.
• Form medium-sized cutlets and roll in breadcrumbs. If the oil in the frying pan is already heated, then lay them out and fry until golden brown on each side. The heat treatment process itself takes no more than 5-6 minutes.
• Rotan cutlets can be served hot or cold with fresh or canned vegetables and salads. Mashed potatoes or boiled fluffy rice are good as a side dish.

Tip : if you want to use cut off heads to prepare fish soup, then immediately remove the gills from them so that they do not spoil.

How to store rotan in winter

It is better to store rotan in winter frozen in water, in a plastic bucket, simply by placing it on the balcony. Rotan is adapted to this by nature. It is by freezing into ice that it most often spends the winter in shallow bodies of water, which is why it is so tenacious. In the ice in the bucket, he remains more alive than all the living until spring.

Winter spinning fishing on the Moscow River and in the Moscow region

Recipe for making burbot fish soup at home >>

Minced meat cutlets

Before preparing rotan cutlets, you need to make minced meat. The fish must be prepared, scaled, gutted, fins and tail trimmed, and the head separated. For rotan cutlets, the recipe is quite simple and does not differ fundamentally from preparing any other fish . For minced meat you will need:

1. Rotan (fillet or small fish) - 500 g;
2. Lard or rendered fat - 100 gr.;
3. Spices (to taste);
4. Egg - 1-2 pcs.;
5. Flour or semolina;
6. Potatoes - 1-2 pcs.;
7. Butter - 25 gr.;
8. Onion - 1-2 pcs.

The prepared fish must be thoroughly washed and ground in a meat grinder (preferably 2 times to reduce the amount of large bone residues). After that, I pass the onions, potatoes and lard through a meat grinder. Eggs are beaten into the resulting mass, butter, flour and spices are added.

Flour and eggs act as a binding material and prevent the minced meat from spreading. Instead of flour, you can use semolina. The minced meat is thoroughly mixed, divided into portions and rolled in breadcrumbs. The resulting semi-finished products can be stored in the freezer or cooked immediately.

During cooking, the frying pan with vegetable oil must be thoroughly heated. After this, carefully place the cutlets. The fish cooks quickly; frying on one side will take 12-15 minutes. You can use mashed potatoes or rice as a side dish.

Where is it found and what does it eat?

Rotan fish is found in rivers and lakes in northeast China, northern Korea, and northwest Sakhalin. At the beginning of the 20th century, the “Amur goby” appeared in reservoirs around St. Petersburg, after which it very quickly spread throughout the northern part of Eurasia, including most of Russia.

Photo. Habitat of rotan. The places where rotan originated are indicated in green, and the places of settlement in pink.

Rivers in whose basins rotan are caught:

• Ob is the largest river in Western Siberia;
• Styr is a tributary of the Pripyat, flowing through the territories of Ukraine and Belarus;
• Ural - flows in Eastern Europe through the territories of the Russian Federation and Kazakhstan;
• The Irtysh is the left tributary of the Ob, the waters of which pass through China, Kazakhstan and the Russian Federation;
• The Danube is the longest river in the European Union;
• Dniester - flows through the territories of Moldova and Ukraine;
• Don is a large river in the European part of the Russian Federation;
• Dnieper - ranks 4th in length among European rivers;
• The Volga is the largest river in the European part of Russia.

Due to its dark, dull color, rotan is almost invisible in the water, which serves as good camouflage for it when hunting. Firebrands feed on:

• small fish, often of their own species - cannibalism flourishes among them;
• fry, tadpoles, invertebrates;
• crustacean larvae;
• newts, leeches;
• caviar of other fish.

Ichthyologists have established that rotan practically does not feed on aquatic plants; no traces of food of plant origin are found in the caught fish. Its diet consists of small specimens of river fauna that live in the waters and at the bottom of fresh water bodies.