Shalom!
As you already understood from the greeting, today we will turn our eyes towards the promised land. One of the bright representatives of Jewish cuisine has always been stuffed fish or Gephilte Fish in the original.
You can read about all the diversity of this dish on Wikipedia. I especially liked this passage there:
One of the possible causes of the prevalence and popularity of this dish among Jews of Eastern Europe can be economic: Jewish commandments that order eat meat and wine during the main festive Saturday meal, held in the evening of Friday.
Since Jewish families in the east of Europe were mainly poor and large and therefore often could not afford to cook meat or fish in its pure form (whole piece) every week before the onset of Shabbat — the preparation of “as if whole” fish, filled with minced meat: thereby, there was the opportunity to significantly increase the volume and nutrition of the portion, using a cheaper one. — And at the same time fulfill the commandment.
The resourcefulness of the ancestors, as we see, was, still, not to occupy))
In general, pike was lying in our freezer. They bought a couple for the smoked coats in the summer, did one, but did not reach the second hand. For some time they thought where to attach her, and then the stuffed fish was remembered and, as they say, it rushed.
The following products were taken:
Here we have everything kosher:
- Pike
- Milk
- Bread (in the original Matsa)
- Beet
- Egg
- Onion
- Carrot
- Salt, pepper, nutmeg
It is worth saying that it is advisable to purchase fish with the head, tail and fins. All these details also go into business and broth is cooked on their basis, which is then used to prepare the main dish.
So, the fish was washed, cleaned, gutted, cut into small pieces and, if necessary, scolded the smell:
Now they separated all the pulp, leaving such blanks:
Next, soak the bread in milk:
We squeeze it and all, except for skins, beets and carrots, throw it into a combine with the addition of a small amount of sugar. We make minced meat from all this:
We clean the beets and do not cut it off. Similarly, we act with carrots and put them on the bottom of the pots:
Now is a crucial moment. We take our skins and sculpt from them and the minced meat again a kind of fish:
Since our fish was frozen, there were quite a lot of water in the minced meat and it was relatively liquid. Therefore, I advise you to get rid of this fluid by hook or by this liquid before everything is loaded into a combine or meat grinder. In general, squeeze the fish, soak the bread less with milk, etc.
After the formation of «pieces», they are laid out on top of beets and carrots:
… and neatly poured with boiling water (and better, pre -cooked fish broth from the same head and fins that I spoke about at the very beginning):
We put everything on fire and cook under the lid for about an hour and a half. As a result, they come out, in fact, fish meatballs in fish skin. The thing is tasty, try it. Bon appetit.
