Hake in Tomato Sauce with Pasta
Ingredients
2 servings
For the sauce
- Fish fillet (pollock, hake) 250 g
- Ripe tomatoes 2-3
- Garlic 1 clove
- Olive oil 3 tbsp
- Water 1-2 tbsp for firm tomatoes, up to 1/4 cup for a puree that is too thick (if needed) (50 ml)
- Sugar 0.5 tsp (2 g)
- Nutmeg a knife tip
- Dried Mediterranean herbs (oregano, savory, basil) 1-2 pinches
- Black pepper, salt to taste
- Hot pepper a pinch (optional)
For the pasta
- Short pasta (penne, fusilli, farfalle) 200 g
- Water for cooking the pasta 2–3 l
- Salt for cooking the pasta 14–21 g (7 g per 1 l of water)
Step-by-step recipe
Preparing the tomatoes and fish
Tomato sauce with fish can be made from any fish you can get, sea or river. It doesn’t matter whether the fish is cheap or “prized”; what matters much more is that the fillet has as few small bones as possible. Among river fish, pike-perch or perch are excellent. By the way, river perch is hard to scale, so I freeze the gutted perch without scaling it, and then cut the fillet off the skin. Sea fish with white flesh – pollock, hake, notothenia, perch and so on. And from “red” fish it is better to cook grilled trout.
The tomatoes for the sauce need to be perfectly ripe and fresh, with red flesh. If vegetables are out of season, fresh tomatoes can be replaced with canned tomato pulp: you’ll need about half a can, around a full cup.
Make the tomato puree: scald the ripe tomatoes with boiling water and peel off the skin. Remove the seeds, put the flesh in a blender and blend it into a puree. If the tomatoes are firm, you can add 1-2 tbsp of water to the flesh for more even blending. For a smooth sauce, blend the puree well.
Prepare the fish: thaw the fish by moving it from the freezer to the fridge overnight. That way it won’t leak. For the sauce I use inexpensive fish – hake, pollock or cod. Clean the fish and cut off all the flesh, removing any remaining fins, skin and bones. Since the sauce is blended at the very end of cooking, or the pieces of fish in it are very small, the size of the pieces of flesh doesn’t matter.
Sauce
Flavor the oil with garlic: in a saucepan over medium heat, warm the olive oil and fry a peeled, flattened garlic clove in it. Once the garlic starts to darken, throw it away.
Fry the prepared fish fillet in this oil over medium heat, stirring, for 4-5 mins, until the flesh turns opaque. If you want the fish sauce to be smooth, without pieces, you don’t need to break up the fish while frying. If you prefer pieces of fish in the sauce, break up the fillet with a spatula as you fry, until it looks like coarsely grated vegetables and consists of small pieces and separate fibers.
Add the tomato puree and spices: salt and pepper the fried fish and add the tomato puree you made earlier.
Add 0.5 tsp of sugar (2 g) and a knife tip of ground nutmeg. Also add 1-2 pinches of dried aromatic herbs typical of Italian and Mediterranean cooking – oregano, savory, basil and so on. Such mixes are sold ready-made and don’t contain any “healthy” additives.
If the tomato puree is too thick, you can add a little water, no more than a quarter cup, otherwise the fish sauce will turn out too runny and won’t cling to the pasta.
Simmer the sauce covered: bring to a boil over medium heat, then once it boils, cover the saucepan and turn the heat down to the minimum. Simmer for 15 mins. During that time stir the sauce 2-3 times, making sure the pieces of fish stay in the liquid and stew. By the way, you can add a pinch of hot pepper to the sauce – fans of spicy food will appreciate it.
Blend the sauce – depending on how you decided to make it: with pieces of fish or smooth. For a smooth sauce, let it cool a little, pour it into a blender jar and blend until completely smooth. Or, if you prefer pieces of fish in the sauce, crush the large pieces of fillet in the sauce once more.
In the end the sauce should have the consistency of thick sour cream, so the pasta can hold it on its surface instead of floating in it like in a soup.
Pasta
This tomato sauce with fish is perfect with short pasta – penne, fusilli, farfalle.
Boil the pasta in 2-3 l of water, adding salt at 7 g of salt per liter of water (14–21 g). The cooking time is printed on the package, and the manufacturer guarantees an al dente texture in that time. Drain the cooked pasta in a colander and divide it among plates.
Serving
Put the tomato sauce with fish on top of the cooked pasta. It is better to mix the pasta and sauce right on the plate. But if you went with the smooth sauce, you can combine the pasta and sauce in the saucepan and only then divide it among plates.
Serve without waiting for it to cool, while the tomato sauce with fish is still piping hot – that’s when the dish tastes best. The sauce also goes well with rice. If you use the sauce to spread on pizza dough, cool it to room temperature first.
Calories and macros
690 kcal
Serving ≈ 460 g
- Protein37 g22% of kcal
- Fat23 g32% of kcal
- Carbs77 g46% of kcal
100 g150 kcalProtein 8 gFat 5.1 gCarbs 16.8 g
Calculated from the recipe ingredients, excluding salt and spices. Data: USDA and Matvaretabellen.