Salt mackerel at home: how to do it right
What could be tastier than homemade salted fish prepared with your own hands from fresh and natural products? Perhaps only mackerel - juicy, moderately fatty, smelling of spices and filled with love. For an experienced housewife, there is nothing difficult in how to salt mackerel, but if this is your first time doing this, we suggest using our recommendations. You need a minimum of ingredients: the fish itself and spices for dressing the marinade. So let's get started.
Read also the article: how to salt herring at home delicious in whole brine!
We prepare the fish
The first step is to purchase mackerel. It is better if it is fresh, but the frozen carcass will also come off, the main thing is that it does not turn out to be old, which has been in the freezer for an unknown amount of time, otherwise it will ruin everything.
Fresh fish should be light gray in color without any hint of yellowness, emit a light characteristic aroma, firm and slightly moist to the touch. You need to choose large or medium-sized carcasses, in small ones there are many bones and little fat.
Now we clean the mackerel:
- chop her tail and head (the latter, if desired, can also be salted, having previously removed the gill);
- choose giblets;
- remove the black film inside;
- rinse well and let dry.
Salt the mackerel can be whole or in pieces.
Making a marinade
There are many recipes for making marinade, each housewife adds different spices to her taste. Someone loves a piquant note and puts cloves, coriander and basil for this, while others even salt in tea leaves. We suggest using the classic method and making the simplest marinade from the products that are always available in every kitchen.
For this you will need:
- rock salt - five tablespoons;
- granulated sugar - three of the same spoons;
- 10 black peppercorns;
- lavrushka - 4 leaves;
- mustard powder - half a tablespoon.
All ingredients are per liter of water. This is enough to salt two medium mackerels, but if there are more fish, we accordingly increase the amount of marinade.
Prepare the marinade as usual: bring the water to a boil, add all the spices, let it boil for a couple of minutes and remove from the stove. Cover with a lid and leave to infuse and cool to room temperature.
Salt the fish
The most important, but easy, part of the work remains - to put the mackerel in glass or plastic dishes, pour the marinade and refrigerate. The whole carcass should be salted in about three days (depending on the size of the fish), and if you marinate the pieces, you can eat them in a day. This is how quickly and easily you can salt the mackerel yourself. It will be a little cheaper than buying ready-made fish, and it certainly tastes better.