Baked Pike in Sour Cream with Horseradish

Preparing the pike

1. Pike in sour cream works best with a fish weighing about 3 kg. For two people you can make the dish from the tail of a large pike.

2. Fillet the pike. Take a scaled piece of the body, fillet it, and remove the fins and all visible bones. You can leave the skin on: it keeps the meat from falling apart during baking. Wash the fish thoroughly and pat it dry with paper towels. Pike meat always has small bones, which are easy to remove while eating when the pike stewed in sour cream is served.

   

3. Cut the fillet and leave it with the spices. So that the pieces are easy to pick up, they shouldn’t be too small: ideally, cut the fillet across the body into strips 3-4 cm wide. Put the cut fillet skin side down on a flat plate, sprinkle with salt, pepper and sweet paprika, and leave in the cold (in the fridge) for 30-40 mins.

   

Sour cream sauce and baking

1. You need homemade sour cream for this dish. For some unknown reason, store-bought sour cream, even a very good one, curdles when heated, forming grains and looking like cottage cheese. This doesn’t happen with homemade sour cream.

2. Make the sauce from sour cream and horseradish. Peel a small piece of horseradish root and grate it; alternatively, you can grind it in a meat grinder. Mix with a fork the sour cream, 2-3 tbsp of grated horseradish (27–41 g) and 1 tsp of sugar (5 g). If you like, add a little salt so the pike in sour cream sauce isn’t too bland.

   

3. Put the fillet in a baking dish and pour the sauce over it. For baking you need a wide dish, either ceramic or heatproof glass. Grease the dish with oil and put the pieces of pike fillet in it, skin side down. Leave a noticeable gap between the pieces: if they are packed tightly, the dish won’t divide into portions well after cooking. Carefully pour the sour cream sauce over the fish, with no gaps, so it covers all the pieces.

   

4. Bake the pike in an oven preheated to 180°C, uncovered, for over 40 mins, until the sour cream on the fillet pieces starts to brown and turns golden. A good part of the time goes to heating and evaporating the excess moisture from the sauce. All this time the fish stews in the sour cream and becomes very juicy and tender.

Side dishes

1. While the pike is baking, prepare the mashed potatoes and the vegetable side dish. We usually serve grilled vegetables as a side, but this time we kept it simple with pan-fried vegetables.

2. Make the mashed potatoes. Peel the potatoes and boil them until tender. Drain the water, add a small piece of butter, add salt and mash the potatoes, adding milk or the water they were boiled in.

3. Fry the pepper, celery and onion. For the side dish we took two carrots and a medium-sized parsnip, celery stalks, an onion and a hot pepper.

   

   Remove the seeds from the pepper and slice it. Heat 2-3 tbsp of vegetable oil in a pan over medium heat and fry the pepper in it for 2-3 mins. Add the diced celery stalks and the onion cut into thick strips, and fry until the onion is lightly browned.

   

4. Add the carrot and parsnip. Peel the carrots and parsnip and cut them into cubes. Lower the heat, add the chopped roots to the onion and celery and fry, stirring often, until the carrot and parsnip cubes are easily pierced with the tip of a knife.

   

Serving

1. Take the dish with the fish out of the oven when the sour cream has browned. If the pieces lie loosely enough, you can transfer them to plates without damaging them. Otherwise, separate the pieces with a knife first.

   

2. Arrange on plates. Put the mashed potatoes down, with the fried vegetable side dish along the edge. Place the pieces of fish on the potatoes and pour the sour cream sauce over them. You can add a sprig of herbs.

   

   Pike in sour cream with horseradish is not a spicy dish. If you like, sprinkle it with a pinch of hot pepper, simply add black pepper or serve it with table horseradish. It’s best served hot, with white bread. You can make any side dish you like: fried rice or boiled brown rice would also go well.