Stuffed Mackerel with Tomatoes, Onion and Potatoes
How often do we cook stuffed fish? And stuffed mackerel is a delicious and unusual dish.
Back in my deep childhood I had three favorite stuffed dishes: stuffed fish, stuffed cabbage rolls (holubtsi), and stuffed cellophane, meaning milk sausages. Most often, of course, we made cabbage rolls at home. The filling for them was usually a mix of pork and boiled rice. The home recipe never changes and gets repeated over and over. The sausages were completely harmless back then and even beloved. In any cafeteria you could (and should) order 2-3 wonderful, incredibly tasty milk sausages, not yet in a “natural” casing but in cellophane. They were a little swollen from long boiling. Always served with a piece of fresh Ukrainian bread and tomato sauce. It was almost a delicacy.
But the stuffed fish of my childhood was carp. Less often, stuffed mackerel. For various reasons, freshwater fish was a rarity for us then. And carp, as a rule, were sold in bulk only in specialized shops, and in autumn straight from a tank truck near the grocery store. Still, carp were available. I remember my mother buying a small carp of 2-3 kg. The skin was peeled off in one piece like a stocking and stuffed with a filling of raw fish and bread soaked in milk.
Forcemeat, by the way, is a ground mixture of different foods: meat, fish, mushrooms, with added vegetables, herbs, spices and other additions. Forcemeat doesn’t have to be used for stuffing. For example, minced meat or fish is used to make patties, meatballs or fish balls.
For some reason I always believed that fish must be stuffed with one particular filling, using one particular technique.
That was until I tried a very tasty mackerel stuffed with vegetables in a faraway foreign country. I confess I considered mackerel the least suitable fish for stuffing. It was a surprise.
It turned out that mackerel changed my thinking and took me away from cooking stereotypes. It turns out you don’t have to stuff the removed skin of the fish. You can simply prepare the fish so that it has a cavity suitable for a filling. Besides, since fish cooks very quickly, the filling can be practically ready already. So it is simply impossible to undercook the fish. Many people think mackerel is “dry”, and many are put off by the smell. I’ll say this: all of it is easily fixed.
Ingredients
1 serving
Step-by-step recipe
Bake the potatoes, either in the oven or in the microwave. Cool the baked potatoes and peel them. While the potatoes bake, prepare the fish.
Wash the mackerel. Without cutting off the head, slit the belly and remove all the innards and gills. Rinse thoroughly under running water. With scissors, snip the rib bones along the backbone. Then, with a knife, carefully cut out the whole backbone, from the head to the very tip of the tail. Remove all the large bones.
You should be left with a mackerel fillet with the head and tail, opened like a book.
In a mortar, mix 1 teaspoon each of mixed peppercorns (sold in stores), coarse or sea salt, and a mix of dried herbs (oregano, basil, mint, savory and so on). Add a knife tip of ground dried ginger and nutmeg. Grind the spices in the mortar to a powder.
Set aside a third of the spices for the side dish and rub most of the rest into the inside of the mackerel. Grate one garlic clove and rub it all over the inside of the fish. Let it rest while the filling is prepared.
Stuffed mackerel is filled with a very simple stuffing. Cut the onion into thin strips and fry in olive oil until soft. Mix the fried onion with the finely chopped flesh of one tomato. Scald the tomato first, peel it and remove the seeds. Simmer the onion with the tomato for 5-6 minutes under a lid. Add 1-2 pinches of the spice mix prepared earlier.
Grease a ceramic or glass baking dish with oil and lay a little sliced tomato in it.
Put all the onion and tomato filling inside the prepared mackerel. Fold the mackerel in half. There’s no need to sew or tie it. The filling won’t “leak”. Still, it’s up to you.
Place the stuffed mackerel in the dish on top of the tomatoes. The tomatoes are there so the fish doesn’t stick to the bottom of the dish while baking. There should be a small gap between the fish and the dish.
Around the fish, arrange the sliced baked potatoes, alternating them with tomato slices. Then sprinkle the fish and the side dish with the rest of the spice mix, and rub the fish with the second garlic clove, finely chopped beforehand. Drizzle the fish with a little olive oil; ideally the fish should be coated with oil.
That completes the preparation.
The mackerel bakes in an oven preheated to 200-210°C. The cooking time is roughly 20 minutes. You may need to increase it slightly. In other words, the stuffed mackerel needs to be cooked through.
Put the finished fish on a plate and arrange the side dish around it. Sprinkle the fish with parsley, or simply lay sprigs around it. If you like, as many people are used to, you can squeeze lemon juice over the fish, since stuffed mackerel loves lemon.
I recommend a glass of dry white wine with the fish.
Calories and macros
1315 kcal
Serving ≈ 680 g
- Protein52 g16% of kcal
- Fat95 g66% of kcal
- Carbs57 g18% of kcal
100 g193 kcalProtein 7.6 gFat 13.9 gCarbs 8.4 g
Calculated from the recipe ingredients, excluding salt and spices. Data: USDA and Matvaretabellen.
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