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Catfish Soup – Recipe at Home
Instructions
Clean the scales off the silver carp and cut it into medium pieces. If you have a versatile tool at home – metal shears – it is very easy to make cuts along the backbone of the fish with them. Finish the cuts off with a kitchen knife.
Pour water over the pieces of fish without the head and put them on to cook the broth.
Remove the gills and eyes from the head and wash it thoroughly. If you do not add the head to the broth, the soup turns out with a more delicate flavour but is also less rich. So, to make the soup rich and filling yet without any off-taste or bitterness, I put the head in a separate pot, add 1 l of water, bring it to the boil and simmer it for about 5 minutes. After that I drain the water, take out the head and add it to the boiling pot with the rest of the fish pieces.
To make the soup clear and good-looking, you should not let it boil too vigorously. Once it comes to the boil and the foam (scum) has been skimmed off, reduce the heat and carry on cooking over a low flame.
Thirty minutes from when the broth starts to boil, add a whole onion (if it is large, cut it into 2 pieces).
Another 30 minutes later, add the potatoes cut into batons. It is better to make the batons large, as is proper in a fish ukha.
Together with the potatoes, add the carrot cut into pieces, salt, bay leaf, a few caraway seeds and a few allspice peas. The pepper can be crushed beforehand for a more refined aroma.
Twenty minutes after adding the potatoes and the rest of the ingredients, take the finished soup off the heat. It is now better to lift the head and the pieces of silver carp out of the pot. Do this very carefully, so that they do not fall apart and small bones do not end up in the broth.
Choosing fish for the soup
River fish is usually used for ukha. Good choices for this purpose are perch, pike, carp, bream, silver carp. Crucian carp has a peculiar taste, but some people cook with it too. Not every sea fish is suitable. People living in coastal areas make a wonderful soup from haarder (so-iuy mullet).
It is great when the family is keen on fishing – then you have the chance to catch and bring home some good fresh fish yourself. I, however, "caught" a decent, medium-sized silver carp at the market, and that is what we will use to make our soup. This amount of ingredients yields a good pot of soup, about 3 l in volume.
Caloric value: 33 kcal per 100 grams of the dish.
Should you put the fish head in the soup?
When making ukha from bream, perch or carp, I do not use the heads – otherwise you can end up with a slightly bitter, unpleasant taste. But how can you throw away the large head of a silver carp or a mullet? Besides, it gives the dish the "richness" it needs. So I use part of the fish along with its head (in a 50/50 proportion), making sure to remove the eyes and gills from it, since it is precisely these that add the unwanted bitterness.
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