Catfish steaks in the oven with sour cream
Catfish is a fish almost always cooked from frozen, and not out of laziness. A catfish you catch is rarely a small one: even a modest specimen means several kilos of meat that cannot be eaten in one go, so most of it goes into the freezer the same evening.
The second thing about it is the thickness. A catfish steak three fingers thick will not heat through in twenty minutes, whatever the oven dial says: outside there will be a crust, inside it will be raw. Hence an hour at a moderate 190 °C rather than half an hour at 220 °C.
The sour cream here is not a sauce but a medium. The steaks lie in it completely, and instead of the dry heat of the oven a hot thick liquid works on them — much as in braising. Catfish meat is dense and fatty and stands up to that treatment; zander in sour cream would simply fall apart over an hour.
The same catfish is layered with potatoes in catfish with potatoes in a cast-iron pan, and meets sour cream and mushrooms in catfish baked in sour cream with mushrooms.
Caloric content: 185kcal
Take the fish out of the freezer
Thaw it in water
Cut it into steaks and marinate them
Put them in a dish
Pour the sour cream over
Bake for an hour
Serve
Notes
- Thaw it in cold water rather than warm. Warm water speeds things up on the outside and leaves the middle icy, while the top layer of meat has time to go woolly.
- An hour of marinating is the minimum, and the steaks get turned over. The lemon juice runs to the bottom, and the underside marinates twice as fast as the top.
- Lemon works better with catfish than with any other fish we catch here. Catfish has a characteristic taste of silt and fat, and the acid takes away exactly that without touching anything else in the flavour.
- The sour cream should cover the fish, not sit on top of it as a layer. The uncovered edges of a steak will dry out over an hour while the covered part is still cooking.
- Do not take the skin off. It holds the steak together: without it a piece will fall apart into fibres in the dish over an hour.
- Judge it by the bone. The meat by the backbone should be white and come away easily; pink colour at the bone means another half hour.
Recipe and step-by-step photos — kolizhanka.net.ua.
