Zander fillet with cheese in the oven

This is a recipe for people who do not like picking a fish apart at the table. The zander is filleted straight away — no skin, no bones — and after that the dish is eaten with a fork, like a bake. The price of that convenience is the usual problem with this fish: zander fillet is lean and dries out faster than anything else in the oven.

Three things at once work against the dryness. The fried onion under the fish releases moisture from below, the pieces of butter melt and soak into the fillet from within, and the topping of sour cream with grated cheese closes off the top and stops the moisture evaporating. The cheese does not form a crust here — it melts into the sour cream and turns into a sauce.

180 °C and twenty to thirty minutes: for thin fillet that is enough. If it is a crust you want rather than a sauce, zander with carrot, onion and a cheese crust is the better choice — there the cheese goes on dry and at the end.

The same zander sits under sour cream and onions in zander baked in sour cream with onions, while zander baked in pieces with carrot and onion goes without sauce on four ingredients.

Caloric content: 190kcal

Notes

• Mix the cheese and the sour cream beforehand. Dry cheese scattered on top will set into a crust within ten minutes at 180 °C and then simply burn while the fish is still cooking.
• Fry the onion until translucent, not until golden. Browned onion will turn bitter under sour cream; what is wanted from it here is moisture and sweetness, not a fried taste.
• Put the butter on in pieces rather than melting it. Melted butter runs to the bottom of the dish at once, while pieces melt gradually and have time to soak into the meat.
• The skin comes off and the bones come out. That is the main thing in this recipe: zander has few small bones and the fillet really does come out clean — which is exactly why the dish suits children.
• Let it stand for 5–10 minutes when it is done. The hot sour cream and cheese sauce is thin and will run off onto the plate; a few minutes later it thickens and stays on the fish.
• Do not throw the head, the backbone and the fins away. Zander gives the clearest broth of all our fish — the trimmings make a good base for fish soup.

Recipe and step-by-step photos — kolizhanka.net.ua.