Clarissa’s Gefilte Fish: A Recipe

This New Year’s celebration is Jewish-themed, which means Gefilte fish couldn’t be avoided. It takes forever to make, but look how beautiful it is:

See how to make it under the fold.

For this recipe, I bought a whole milk fish at the Global Foods store.

This whole beautiful fish cost just $4.10. I also got two tilapia. Mind you, filets don’t work for this dish. We need heads, fins, and ideally scales.

I descaled and gutted the fish. Then I took out the spine and big bones and placed them in a pan. After that, I removed all the flesh from inside the fish, making sure that the skin remained intact.

The flesh from the milkfish and the tilapia goes into a bowl:

The heads from the tilapia, the tails, the fins, the scales, and the milkfish’s spine and bones are placed in a pan.

Add a whole onion, unpeeled, bay leaf, some peppercorns, a carrot, and anything that you’d put in a stock. There is no need to cut anything into pretty slices because all of this will be discarded. We just need the liquid.

Bring the stock to the boil and bring down the heat. Cover. Leave the pan on a very slow heat.

Put the flesh of the fish through a blender, soak half a baguette in milk and also put it through a blender. Mix it with the fish. Now put a medium onion through a blender and add it to the fish.

Add salt, black pepper and a little over 1/2 tablespoon of sugar. I also added some fresh dill. Mix it all up and stuff the skin.

In an oven-proof dish, cover the bottom with sliced onion, carrots and/or beets. Put the stuffed milkfish on the sliced vegetables. I had a lot of stuffing left, so I formed 3 fish balls and placed them next to the fish.

Then, I poured the fish stock through a piece of gauze on the fish.

Now the fish goes into the oven for about 4 hours.

After it emerges from the oven, it looks like this:

Now we decorate our fish, let it cool down, and place it in the refrigerator overnight. This is a dish that is supposed to be eaten cold. The stock will turn into a delicious jelly in the fridge.

L’chaim!