Pan-fried carp with onions
Carp from a pond or a river is the fish most often brought home whole and large, two kilograms and more. Frying it whole is awkward: by the time the middle heats through, the sides dry out. So the carp is cut into pieces across the backbone, and each piece is fried like a separate steak.
There are three large onions in this recipe for two kilograms of fish, and that is not a mistake. The onion here is not a seasoning but the second half of the dish: piled into the pan on top of the fish, under a lid it gives up its juice, and the carp finishes cooking not in dry oil but in onion steam. That is exactly why the flesh stays juicy where plain fried fish comes out dry.
Half an hour of marinating in salt and pepper is the step you will want to skip — and skipping it is a mistake: the salt has time to work through the piece, and the fish is salted inside, not only on the outside.
The same carp on a bigger fish goes into mirror carp fried as steaks, while carp fried in pieces with a crispy crust trades juiciness for crust.
Caloric content: 230kcal
Clean and rinse the carp
Cut and marinate
Slice the onion
Heat the oil
Get the flour ready
Coat the pieces and put them into the oil
Fry the first side and pile on the onion
Finish under the lid
Take the lid off and serve
Notes
- You can take more onion than the recipe says. Three onions is the minimum at which the dish still works; with four or five it becomes a side dish in its own right, and it gets eaten before the fish does.
- Flour — exactly one cup, and it should be poured onto a wide plate. Roll the piece and put it into the oil straight away: if the coated carp sits for a while, the flour gets damp from the juice and comes off in the pan.
- The lid comes off at the end. Under the lid the fish cooks, but the crust softens from the steam. The last few minutes without the lid bring the crunch back — that is exactly the difference that makes fried carp at home come out unlike the canteen version.
- Pond carp can taste of silt. That is not spoiled fish but the taste of the water it fed in. Half an hour of marinating with pepper and the onion in the pan take the smell away almost completely; if it is strong, add a spoonful of lemon juice to the marinade.
- Mirror carp is easier to clean. It has almost no scales — only sparse large ones along the sides, and they can be taken off with a knife in a minute.
Recipe and step-by-step photos — kolizhanka.net.ua.
