Smoked eel: where to buy, how to cook and what to eat?

Smoked eel is a wonderful delicacy. In any good restaurant you will be offered this fish as an amazing main dish or in tandem with other ingredients in the salad. In addition to excellent taste, this product has an excellent nutritional value. Smoked eel is also useful, its meat contains iodine, potassium, iron and other minerals necessary for the body, vitamins E, A. How to cook this miracle fish, where to buy and with which products it is best to combine? We will look for answers to all the questions.

Where in the capital is selling smoked eel?

Moscow is a huge metropolis. In this city you can find any product, even the most scarce. Smoked eel is stored on the shelves at grocery stores along with other types of fish. It is better to look for it in supermarkets, since in small private shops it is unlikely to find this outlandish product. If the price of smoked eel seems too high or you do not want to spend time searching, you can try to make this culinary masterpiece yourself. It will not be worse than the store!

Cooking ourselves

If you have a smokehouse at home, it's a sin not to use it to make an eel. Immediately before the start of the process, the fish should be prepared. The ears should be thoroughly washed and cleaned, gutted absolutely all the insides. After this, it is desirable to once again dip the fish into the water, after having treated it with salt. Before you start to smoke the eel, you need to salivate it for a short period of time. This will help a special pickle. For its preparation, only water (based on 5 kg of fish - 6-7 l) and salt (1 kg) will be needed. Fish in this brine should be kept no more than 10 minutes, and if the pieces are small and thin, then the time needs to be spent half as much. After that, the eel should be thoroughly rinsed, and then dried. Now it's a small matter - we plant a fire in the smokehouse, warm it up to a temperature of no more than 80 degrees. It is this indicator of the thermometer that needs to be maintained throughout the whole process of cooking the eel, and this will take 1-1.5 hours, depending on the size and thickness of the pieces. You can smoke this fish, using also a barbecue grill. When using this method of cooking, the eel turns out to be less greasy. It should be noted that for smoking are more suitable firewood of fruit trees or oak. It is better not to use conifers - they will give the fish a bitter taste.

What does smoked eel combine with?

Recipes provide different variations of dishes with this delicious fish. For the unsophisticated best, the smoked eel with a black bread and onion will seem to be a good meal. Often use this product as a filling for sushi. It is most delicious to use this fish with vegetables, fruits, salads, flour products. Smoked eel - a calorie and completely independent product, it should play the first violin in any dish. Therefore, do not combine it with heavy products that have an unusual taste. The emphasis in the plate should be one.

Salad with smoked eel

There are a lot of recipes, and the first, which we will tell, is the simplest and the most simple. To prepare a dish such as salad with smoked eel, you will need the smoked eel (300 g), 2 cucumbers, red bell pepper, lemon juice, any salad leaves, vegetable oil (preferably olive) and salt. Vegetables need to be cut into strips, like fish. Lettuce leaves should be broken into small, convenient for eating slices. All ingredients should be mixed, add dressing and spices, salt. You can decorate the dish with sesame seeds.

The second version of the salad has claims to love gourmets. The list of necessary products includes smoked eel (350 g), Peking cabbage, a few cedar nuts, slightly more than half a glass of prunes, olive oil, juice of one lemon, cognac (1 tbsp.), Mustard (half a teaspoon) and apples 2 small ones). Fish cut into strips, grind vegetables, add dried fruits. Now let's start cooking the sauce. To do this, mix the butter, lemon juice, mustard and cognac. Peeled and crushed apples should be added in the last turn, so they do not turn black. Salad dressing and immediately served to the table. You can decorate the dish with a grenade or greens. Do not forget that the deli salad is served in small portions. Bon Appetit!