Sometimes housewives have trouble when it comes to cooking caught in a pond or purchased on the market of pikeperch. Some do not want to mess with this fish, because cleaning zander is not easy and even unsafe. But if you consider how delicious and useful it is, then, perhaps, to overcome the difficulties associated with its preparation in order to please your family with a wonderful fish dish. To do this, it is necessary to understand what kind of obstacles arise during the cleaning of this fish and how to cope with them.
Why is it difficult to scrape off scales with pikeperch and what can I use for this?
Pike perch belongs to the fishes of the percids family. Its habitats are rivers and various fresh water bodies. Like other individuals of his family, pike perch is distinguished from many freshwater fish by the presence of stiff scales. In addition, he has very spiny dorsal fins, representing a danger to the hands of the person who caught it or tries to clean it.
To properly and quickly prepare pike perch for heat treatment, you need to acquire a convenient tool for removing scales. Perhaps, in your household, since the days of the Soviet Union, the adaptation intended for this purpose has been preserved. Or maybe you will find such a fishcleaning in modern hardware stores or in the market. If this is a difficult question for you, then try to scrape the scales with a notched knife on the reverse side or a normal metal fork.
But the easiest way is to make the fishwool itself, similar to the factory product, from the improvised materials. This can be done in the following ways.
- Take a metal grater for vegetables with small burrs, bend the pliers of its sides and attach a wooden handle to it.
- To the wooden spatula( from kitchen appliances) screw a few beer caps with teeth to the outside.
- In the bottom of a tin can from inside a nail to pierce a lot of holes, so that from the outside there are burrs - the same as those of a factory float. Provide the resulting product with a U-shaped handle made of hard metal, attaching its edges to the diametrically opposite sides of the can walls.
With regard to the first two options, the tool will be more convenient to use if its working surface is at a slight obtuse angle to the wooden handle.
Fish Cleaner The method of cleaning and cutting of this fish species
To clean zander from scales, without harming yourself, it is necessary first of all to remove its dangerous fins. For this you can use special kitchen scissors. If this object is not in your household, then use an ordinary knife, only it is important to sharpen it well. Cut the spines better by grasping the part of the body that lies at their base. When using a sharp knife, do not point it to where your hands or other parts of your body are - cut it from yourself.
Advice
Do not ignore this recommendation for pre-removal of fins even when you want to quickly prepare pike-perch. If you scrape off the scales without getting rid of thorns on the back of the fish, you can get a festering wound that does not heal for a long time, and sometimes a blood infection.
Once freed from the fins, you can safely proceed with the removal of scales using one of the options of the above-mentioned tool.
To do everything right, you need to perform the following actions( for right-handed people):
- grab the pike-perch with your left hand by the tail,
- the cleaning device in your right hand,
- by moving the tool from tail to head, tear the body of the fish until you release itscales.
Council
To prevent the fish from slipping in the hand, you can rub it with salt before cleaning.
The procedure for removing scales from pike perch has another negative consequence. Whichever device you use to clean this fish, scales will scatter, littering the surrounding space. But this can be avoided by applying one of the following recommendations.
- If you caught the fish yourself, clean it right on the shore of the reservoir, not bringing the garbage into the dwelling.
- If you still decide to do this at home, then do the cleaning in the water.
- You can also clean the pike perch by putting your hands inside the cellophane bag.
Whichever method you choose, you will save time and effort, which would have to be spent on cleaning, especially if you need to process more than one fish. Having removed scales from the body of zander, it is possible to proceed to extract its entrails.
The sequence of this procedure is as follows.
- Take the fish with your left hand( for right-handed people) by the head, placing it with your belly up, while holding your thumb over the gills. So it will be easier to hold in the right position.
- Take the sharp knife in the right hand so that its blade "looks" upwards.
- Hold the knife at a slight angle to the surface of the body of the fish, pierce its belly between the gills and straighten it, pushing the tool to the base of the caudal fin.
- Remove the insides by laying them aside, and wash the pike perch under running water inside and out.
It only remains to separate the fat from the extracted insides, if there is a lot of it, as well as milk or caviar if they are in the fish, and the rest is thrown away. After this, peeled and gutted pike-perch and its edible contents can be used to prepare various delicious dishes.
We recommend reading: how to clean flounder
