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Pickled herring recipe & how to fillet a fish

September 26, 2009 | 34 comments

pickled herring in kefir with dill1

Here’s how to pickle fresh herring. Most recipes on the old internet tell you how to take canned and salted herring, draw off the salt, and season it with vinegar. I wanted to pickle the fish fresh with a live lactobacillus culture, and the recipe I came up with is an adaptation from Linda Ziedrich’s Joy of Pickling.

This fish pickles in just 24 hours and has a mellow flavor. It makes a great snack with bread (and maybe some vodka?), as an appetizer, or as a small meal. The picture above is herring in kefir, sprinkled with dill.

Small fish are popular these days because they’re low on the food chain and don’t collect as much mercury and other metals as larger fish. They’re also a natural source of Omega 3 fatty acids, which supposedly make you happier and smarter. Good combo, huh? These oils are a trend food, too. They’re even getting pumped into orange juice! The only trouble with herring is where to get it. The population goes through booms and busts and this coming season California has closed entirely the part of its fishery that it regulates because there are so few of the little guys. Hopefully, their numbers will rise again. If you can’t get any fresh, sardines might work just as well.

Part of the trick of preparing herring is filleting the fish. If you buy it fresh at the supermarket, they’ll probably clean for you. If you want to fillet it yourself, jump down to how to fillet a fish.

herring fillets and ingredients

Pickled herring recipe

Ingredients for a one-quart mason jar

1 pound whole fresh herring, filleted
several springs dill
1/2 tsp coriander seeds
1 tsp coarsely ground pepper
2 bay leaves
1 small onion (any color)
1/4 cup whey (the thin, whitish water that rises to the top of yogurt)
brine of 1 cup water and 2 tsp salt

optional additions:
crumbled dried chilis or chili flakes
sliced fennel

pickled herring in the jar

Take the dry ingredients and layer them in the jar. I like to lay the fillets flat across the jar. They tend to (almost) fit perfectly that way and it makes them easy to pull out one by one when you want to eat them. Pour in the whey and then add brine until it nearly covers the contents.

pickled herring top

The view from above.

pickled herring sealed from the air

Fill a smaller jar with water and put it into the jar as a weight to press the pickle under the water. A wide-mouth mason jar makes this easier. Drape a towel or cloth over the top and put the jar in a dark place for 24 hours. After that, take out the smaller jar of water, pop a lid on your herring, and throw it in the fridge. It’s ready to eat! And it will last about two weeks in the fridge.

herring at the market
If you want to clean the herring yourself, or you buy it at the farmer’s market like I did, here’s how to fillet a fish.

herring ready to fillet

Rinse off the fish and put them in a bowl. Get a second bowl for the fillets and a third for leftover heads and guts.

start the herring fillet

Start the fillet by lying the fish on its side and cutting down perpendicular to the spine just behind the side fin. Don’t cut all the way through. Keep the knife parallel to the cutting board and bring it down till you hit the bone. Pick up the fish and roll it against the knife so that the knife cuts through the top of the fish. Lay the fish on its other side and cut down like you did on the first side.

cut the herring along the spine

Roll the fish back so that the spine faces you again. angle the knife and cut along the spine toward the tail. Don’t poke the knife all the way through the fish or you’ll rip open the stomach and organs and make a mess. Some bones from the rib cage might end up in the fillet. Fear not! They are small and, especially after the pickling, can be eaten without a problem You won’t even notice them.

cut through to finish herring fillet

When you get toward the back of the herring (just past its butt, to be specific) push the knife all the way through and cut till you reach the tail.

herring open

Pull the fillet up away from the spine. The guts will be held together in a thin sack. Gently pry them from the flesh then cut the fillet away from the fish and put it in the bowl.

cut the guts from the herring

Now you want to get the guts out. Start by cutting them from where they meet the fish’s backside.

herring cleaned

Use the knife to push the guts up toward the head and off of the body.

peel herring head from second fillet

Pick up the fish and hold the head. Gently pull on it to pry the spine away from the second fillet. You might need to use to knife to keep the flesh from sticking to the spine.

keep peeling the herring

Keep pulling!

second herring fillet and leftovers

At the bottom, cut the fillet from the tail. What’s left is compost.

Sauerkraut recipe & a trick for extra good kraut

September 17, 2009 | 2 comments

cabbage and carraway seeds ready for pickling

Awesome picklers, it’s time for sauerkraut with caraway seed and dill. Familiar and exotic at the same time, sauerkraut is like the pickle poster boy of fermentation’s current popularity. Packed with enough beneficial micro-organisms to make foodies and health nuts go nuts, it also smothers sausages with perfect working-class, old-school credibility. Plus it’s easy to make and hard to screw up.

sauerkraut cabbage ready for shredding

Ingredients

As much cabbage as you like. I usually make 5 or 10 pounds at a time, but I think a half-gallon mason jar is about right for 1 head of cabbage. Tell me if I’m wrong.
A bunch of dill (I used 1 for 5 pounds of cabbage)
1-2 Tbsp caraway seeds per 5 pounds of cabbage
3 Tbsp salt per 5 pounds of cabbage

shredding cabbage for sauerkraut on a mandoline

First, shred your cabbage into a big bowl or crock. If there’s one trick to good sauerkraut, it’s getting the shreds nice and thin and consistently sized. Thin strips will get crispy, crunchy, and pickled all the way through while thick slices risk getting mushy on the outside and staying raw on the inside.

I like to chop the heads in half, cut out the hearts, and then split the halves and shred them with a mandoline. That gets the strips much thinner than a knife does. Watch your fingers!

adding salt to cabbage for sauerkraut

To get a good distribution of salt, stop to add spoonfuls of it as you go along and mix it in with a spoon. You can use your hand but that stings after a while.

cabbage with caraway and dill, soon to be sauerkraut

Mix in the caraway seeds and chopped dill a bit at a time as well. Then punch or pack it all down to force out air bubbles.

glass lid to seal cabbage during fermentation

While it ferments, you want your cabbage pressed under a salt brine away from air to keep it from rotting. In my crock I use a glass lid that just happens to fit perfectly. A plate would work well, too. If you’re using a mason jar, you could use a smaller jar filled with water like at the bottom of this post.

closeup of the glass plate

Here’s a closeup of the lid on top of the cabbage.

cabbage weighted with jars of water

Depending on how wet your cabbage is, the salt you’ve added may draw out enough water to completely submerge your kraut. To help bring water out, add pressure by placing a jar or several jars full of water on top. Throw a towel over the whole thing and leave it overnight or for a day. If there still isn’t enough after that, make up a brine of 1 tablespoon salt per cup of water to completely cover the kraut. Especially when packed with extra panache the sauerkraut tends to expand a bit, so if you’re using a plate it’s a good idea to have about an extra inch of brine. If you’re using a jar you might want to store it on a plate, a towel, or something else to catch any overflows.

Cover your fermentation vessel with a towel to keep the dust out and put it in a dark place to begin its voyage. Check on it every few days. A sort of thin white scum often forms at the surface. You can scoop it out if you like, but it’s not dangerous. If mold begins to blossom on the surface in little islands or as a thicker skin, you should scoop it out. Your cabbage is safe, but you don’t want mold in there when you remove the kraut. And get rid of any cabbage bits that float to the surface.

Within two weeks you’ll have a bunch of kraut on your hands. Harvest what you want to eat and stick it in a jar in the fridge, which will slow the fermentation. The rest you can leave as it was—it just gets riper and more delicious. I wanted to take a picture of it for you once it was ready, but we ate it all so quickly I didn’t get a chance!

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Chicha beer: to chew or not to chew?

September 12, 2009 | No comments

To make chicha beer, you start by chewing up corn and spitting it out. There was a skeptical article this week in the New York Times about Dogfish Head brewery’s attempt to make a chicha-inspired beer. It sounds like a lot of work, and it looks like it, too, from this video:

If you want to try it on a smaller scale, there’s a recipe in Katz’s Wild Fermentation. And if the idea of chewing up all that corn sounds like no fun (or just gross), there is a very comprehensive non-chew recipe at LocalHarvest which includes a 1947 Harvard Botanical Museum leaflet on the topic! Foodies will be happy to learn that you can even make wheat-free chicha homebrew out of quinoa.

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