fish, pike II

yesterday i was set out to make fishballs with rest of the pike filees. as i had never done fishballs in my life, i had no recipe for them. i looked at some cookbooks and web-sites and decided that these were what i needed to make pikeballs:

750 gr pike filees (or any other fish)
½ slice country bread (or 1 dl bread crumbs)
4 cm piece of leek
1 tsp grated lemon peel
1 tbsp minced dill
1 egg
2 dl 4% fat cooking cream
1 tsp or to taste, salt (yes, i really used salt this time)


here's the bread and leek






i roughly removed the crust from the bread before putting it into the food prosessor with the leek. i guess you could do this recipe by hand, provided you have a lot of patience to chop and mince forever. my wrist thanked me for taking the easy way and using the food prosessor







did have to do some manual labor, namely grate the lemon peel. if you haven't tried microplane graters yet, it's time. they're so handy, just mind your fingertips...







i cut the pike filees into 2 x 5 cm pieces before placing them in the prosessor on top the bread, leek, salt and lemon peel. most of the bones were gone when the fish was fileed, there were some left in the meat, but the machine took care of those. i guess i could have minced the dill before adding it to the mix, but i thought that the machine could do the work for me (it did)







a minute or so later (by which time the dog had gone hiding under a table in another room) the mix looked like this. i then added the egg and cream and let the machine do it's thing. most fishball recipes mentioned lemon pepper, i've never been a fan of lemon pepper so i don't have it in the pantry. i thought about using white pepper but left that out in the hopes that the leek and lemon peel would do their magic







as i had no idea how the mixture should be looking, i first thought that it was a bit too wet. i tried to make a "ball" out of it in my hands... well, there was no way i was going to make balls with it. i took a big spoon, scooped a spoonfull and slid that onto a buttered pan on medium high heat (yes, there was real butter on the pan, but other than the butter on the pan, there wasn't much fat at all, pike being a very lean fish, and i used only 4% cream) and hoped for the best







few minutes later, look how gorgeous!







most of the recipes i looked at before starting, mentioned cooking the fishballs in the oven. as my "heaps" were a bit on a thick side, i wanted to make sure they were cooked thru, i placed the fried balls onto a baking tray lined with parchment and baked them in 200 C oven for 10 mins. they came out perfect, cooked thru but still slightly moist inside. i did try to make mashed potatoes, but that's all you're going to read about it







dad, you really ought to give pike a chance, these were really good. a sour cream and dill sauce might have been nice, but not necessary. these would be nice in fish-burgers if you made the patties a bit bigger.

public service announcement: warnings of the sharp blades in food prosessors are there for a very good reason, they ARE sharp and can accidentally slice off some of your finger!







take care of YOUR fingers...