Oven-Baked Saury with Pine Nuts

Name: Baked Saury in the Oven with Pine Nuts and Tomato
Prep time: 20 min
Cook time: 40 min
Total time: 1 h
Cuisine: European
Ingredients: Saury 2; Pine nuts 2 tbsp (21 g); Garlic 2 cloves; Tomato 1; Olive oil 50 ml; Spices: salt, ground black pepper, dried aromatic herbs to taste; Lemon juice a little; Parsley a few leaves, for serving

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60 mins

It so happens that my wife adores strawberries, apples and fish. She eats apples practically all the time, strawberries in season in impressive quantities, and fish whenever I come back from a fishing trip. But this oven-baked saury, made from sea fish we bought by chance, was liked by everyone.

We often buy sea fish anyway, and we especially love mackerel and sea bass. Our home recipes for grilled mackerel, baked sea bass and mackerel with cheese have long since “gone out into the world,” especially among our friends.

Simple cooking techniques, nothing complicated. Baking is within anyone’s reach, and I’m sure it’s even easier than frying eggs or making an omelet. Although even such a simple process ends for some people in fires, burns and who knows what else.

Once, in one of the countries of the East, we met the owner of an incredibly decent little restaurant whose main menu was fish and seafood. For obvious reasons, we couldn’t walk past. We tried a dish called “fish with nuts”: sardines baked with pine nuts. Incredibly simple and very tasty, though most likely it was a delicious oven-baked saury with nuts.

We didn’t repeat that recipe at home because of the difficulty of buying fresh sardines and exotic nuts, and the herbs you have to add are quite exotic too.

We decided to make this dish adapted to the products and ingredients we had on hand, and to make the recipe as repeatable as possible.

Quite by chance we bought fresh-frozen saury. Saury is a Pacific fish. It lives in the northern hemisphere and is caught mainly in the Far East and in Southeast Asian countries. Saury is, in fact, an important commercial fish.

In my childhood we saw saury only canned, in the food “rations” eaten by “important” Soviet citizens. Saury is usually a narrow, long, silvery fish, no longer than 40 cm. By the way, canned saury is very, very tasty, simply with fresh bread.

For the nuts we settled on pine nuts. In childhood pine nuts were a treat, and if you also got a cone, it became a toy. Cedars usually grow in the Middle East, the Mediterranean and the Himalayas. The trees we call cedars here (Siberian cedar) are cedars only loosely; they are rather a kind of pine, though they belong to the same family as cedar. But few people pay attention: cedar is cedar, and oven-baked saury turns out well with any nuts.

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Ingredients

2 servings

Saury 2
Pine nuts 2 tbsp (21 g)
Garlic 2 cloves
Tomato 1
Olive oil 50 ml
Spices: salt, ground black pepper, dried aromatic herbs to taste
Lemon juice a little
Parsley a few leaves, for serving

Step-by-step recipe

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Preparing the fish

Besides everything else, you need a baking dish, preferably made of heatproof glass or ceramic. It’s important that the fish, or pieces of fish, lie freely in the dish without touching each other.
Thaw the saury and wash it.
Carefully slit the belly with a sharp knife and gut it under running water. Remove the gills. Wash it very well. Don’t be too rough, as the fish is very delicate and easily damaged.
You can cut the head off: saury turns out surprisingly juicy anyway, as the fish is quite oily and bakes “in its own juices.”
Very carefully remove the backbone and, as far as possible, the rib bones. Kitchen scissors make this easy. You should end up with an “envelope” of fish.
If the whole fish doesn’t fit in the dish, cut it in half. I didn’t have a dish the right size for the whole fish, so I had to cut the saury in half. It didn’t affect the taste, though.
Salt and pepper the inside of the fish to taste. Set aside for a while, while you prepare the filling and the baking dish.

Pine nut paste

In a mortar, combine 2/3 of the pine nuts, 1 garlic clove and a pinch of salt. Grind to a paste.
Add 1 tbsp of olive oil and grind again. You should get a semi-liquid paste, very fragrant and spicy. Honestly, I almost spread it on bread and ate it!
Spread the inside of the saury with the pine nut and garlic paste and “close” the fish.

Baking

Preheat the oven to 180–200 °C. I deliberately give a range of temperatures, because ovens heat differently and thermostats are calibrated rather loosely. I used 180 °C.
Grease the baking dish with olive oil.
Slice the tomato thinly and arrange it over the bottom of the dish. You don’t need to remove the seeds and skin. Be sure to salt and pepper the tomato lightly.
Place the fish with nuts on top of the tomato.
Sprinkle the fish with 1–2 pinches of aromatic Mediterranean herbs: basil, oregano, savory and so on. Sprinkle with the remaining pine nuts.
Peel the remaining garlic clove, slice it into very thin slivers and spread them over the fish.
Be sure to brush the fish with olive oil. This is important so that the fish bakes well and evenly. It’s very convenient to do it with your fingers: pour olive oil into a cup and, dipping your fingers in the oil, coat the fish.
Put the dish into the preheated oven for 30 minutes, and after that keep an eye on it so the fish doesn’t burn. Mine baked for 40 minutes at 180 °C.

Serving

Put the cooked fish on a plate and garnish with green parsley leaves.
Drizzle with a little lemon juice: oven-baked saury with nuts loves lemon.
Serve the dish hot only. If you’ve carefully removed all the bones, you can eat the fish like a fillet, as everything is edible.

Calories and macros

700 kcal

Serving ≈ 220 g

Protein39 g23% of kcal
Fat59 g75% of kcal
Carbs4 g2% of kcal

100 g314 kcalProtein 17.7 gFat 26.2 gCarbs 1.7 g

Calculated from the recipe ingredients, excluding salt and spices. Data: USDA and Matvaretabellen.

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