Catfish Baked in Sour Cream with Mushrooms
Catfish is the exact opposite of bream: no scales and no fine intermuscular bones, only the backbone and ribs. That is why catfish is cut into steaks, why it is given to children without a second thought, and why it is the one freshwater fish of ours that behaves on a baking tray like meat rather than like fish.
Its second trait is fat. Catfish is fatty, and in the oven that fat renders out; steaks laid on a dry tray will give up all of it in forty minutes and turn stringy. The sour cream here is not seasoning but the means of preventing that: under a layer of sour cream and cheese the fat stays in the fish.
Size matters more here than with any other fish. A catfish up to three or four kilos is pale, with a clean taste. In a big one, from five kilos up, the flesh darkens, the fat turns heavy and a distinct muddy note appears — a property of a mature bottom-dwelling fish, not of a bad catch. A trophy catfish is better turned into fishcakes or cured; for the tray, take a young one.
Catfish is the opposite of a bony fish: put Whole Baked Bream in the Oven on the table and the difference shows at once. The head and tail left over are best used in Home-Canned River Fish in the Oven.
Caloric content: 210kcal
Cut the fish into steaks
Lay out and coat with sour cream
Scatter the mushrooms
Cover with cheese
Bake at 200 °C
Serve in portions
Notes
- The skin is usually removed. On catfish it is thick, scaleless and stays rubbery in the oven. It comes off easily if you nick it at the cut edge and pull with a towel — it is slippery.
- Steaks 2–3 cm thick. Thinner ones dry out even under sour cream; thicker ones will not cook through in forty minutes and the centre stays raw next to the bone.
- Rub the seasoning in, do not sprinkle it on. The surface of catfish is dense and wet; salt merely scattered on top slides off with the sour cream and ends up in the bottom of the dish.
- Any mushrooms will do. Tinned button mushrooms are the simplest; fresh ones release more liquid, in which case take slightly less sour cream or the dish will swim.
- The cheese goes on at the start, not at the end. Unlike meat, fish cooks quickly, and the cheese will not burn in 40 minutes at 200 °C — but it will have time to set into a crust that holds the moisture.
What to do with the trimmings
The head and tail of a catfish are not waste but the richest part: the head is full of cartilage and gelatine, and the broth from it comes out so dense that once cooled it sets to a jelly on its own, with no gelatine added. Do not throw them out with the guts — put them in the freezer in a bag of their own, like carp heads.
Recipe and photos — kolizhanka.net.ua
