Polish-Style Pikeperch with Egg Sauce

Pikeperch is the most prized white fish of our waters and at the same time the leanest: about one per cent fat. In a pan you see it from the first minute — dense white flesh gives up its moisture and turns dry before it has time to brown. That is why the classic pikeperch recipes are almost always about avoiding exactly that.

The Polish way is one of the oldest and simplest. Here the fish is not fried but poached: the fillet goes into a shallow vegetable stock and steams under a lid for a quarter of an hour. The flesh cooks in its own steam in a moist environment, so there is simply nowhere for it to dry out.

The sauce solves the other half of the problem. Finely chopped boiled eggs, warmed in butter with herbs, give the fish the fat it does not have by nature. That is what "Polish style" means — not spices and not breading, but poaching combined with a butter-and-egg dressing.

The same pikeperch can be baked instead of poached — then the moisture comes from a vegetable bed, as in Pike-Perch in the Oven with Carrot, Onion and a Cheese Crust. Another lean fish rescued by a sauce is Pike in Onion and Carrot Marinade.

Caloric content: 150kcal

Notes

• The stock should barely cover the fish, not drown it. Pikeperch in an excess of liquid simply boils and gives its flavour to the water; the point of poaching is steam under a lid, not boiling.
• The vegetables are cooked in advance and do not go into the dish. The carrot and onion are there for the stock, not for the plate: after fifteen minutes with the fish they fall apart and spoil the look.
• Warm the eggs for two minutes, no longer. The aim is to heat them through in butter, not to dry them. Overcooked eggs turn rubbery and scatter over the plate as a dry crumb.
• Butter only. Made with oil, the sauce becomes a different dish: the taste of butter is as much a part of this recipe as the eggs.
• Do not salt the fillet before the stock. Salt goes into the water with the vegetables — from there it enters the fish evenly. Salted on top, the fillet takes it in patches.

How to fillet a pikeperch

Pikeperch has a thick backbone and a hard, spiny dorsal fin — cut that off first, and preferably with scissors: the spines hurt and break off in the skin. Then run the knife along the backbone from head to tail, pressing the blade to the bone. Pikeperch has no fine intermuscular bones, so the fillet comes out clean the first time even without practice — a rare property among our freshwater fish.

Recipe and photos — kolizhanka.net.ua