Experimental cuisine

[fivemack]

helenbr came round this weekend, and so we cooked. Ed did a leek risotto from a 30-Minute Cookbook, which took two hours; I did salmon with pesto and cheese crust, which took nearly twelve minutes.

But the salmon fillets had to be skinned. Dimly remembering something about sushi, I kept the skins and deep-fried them for lunch today. They were singularly unpleasant.

Possibly I should have removed the scales first, but how do you do that?

Comments

[tkb.livejournal.com]

Delia, in her Complete Illustrated Cookery Course, tells us:

If you want to cook fish on the bone, then just ask to have it gutted and, where appropriate, scaled (if the fishmonger doesn't make a proper job of this, you can do it yourself by simply scraping along the skin with the blunt side of a knife in the opposite direction to the way the scales are, ie. from head to tail).

When in Finland, I seem to recall seeing a home-made scaler (for dealing with the fish caught fresh from the lake), made by nailing those little metal bottle-tops upside down - not to the floor in the style of Flander and Swann, but to a wooden brush handle with which one could then scrub the fish.

As for half-hour risotto, Nigel Slater's Real Fast Food has the goal that "...most of the recipes in this book can be completed in under 30 minutes" and admits that "This risotto only just makes it into this collection" so (unless your recipe had a rather different idea of risotto) it was probably always going to be a close thing...

[helenbr.livejournal.com]

I think it would already have been too late to remove the scales by the time you came to cook the skins. You would have had to have done that before you cooked the fish originally, I think, though the Delia method should presumably have worked then.