Smelt dried - a simple recipe for cooking at home

Kitchen appliances and utensils: design for drying, thin skewers, a small bowl, a deep baking sheet 20x30 or a wide bowl, a deep bowl, a colander, a teaspoon.

Ingredients

Step cooking

1. Smelt before cooking must be frozen for at least 2 days. Defrost the fish and rinse with running water. Let the water drain. Spread smelt (1.5 kg) on ​​a deep baking sheet (you can take a wide bowl). Salt is taken at a rate of 1: 1 - for one kilogram of smelt one glass of salt is taken (necessarily large, stone, not iodized). Since we make a quick option for salting, we do not regret salt.
   
2. So, we fill in smelt with 1.5 glasses of salt. And we mix everything well so that the whole smelt is completely in salt - head, tail, gills. To get uniform mixing and salting out, we try to salt each fish with our hands. This is best done if you stack all the fish on a baking sheet in rows.
   
3. No oppression is necessary. Let stand for half an hour. Half an hour has passed. Smelt gave the juice. Once again, we thoroughly mix all the fish, trying to salt it with the resulting brine. Do not be afraid to damage the fish when stirring. It should be well saturated with salt. Again, lay the fish in rows, gently press the palm of your hand and leave for another 0.5 hours.
   
4. So, in total an hour has passed since the moment when we started to smelt smelt. Overloading it is also not necessary, otherwise it will turn out tasteless. Before hanging fish for drying, it must be rinsed with water. Please note: do not soak, but simply rinse the salt, which is not dissolved and is on the smelt. Take a deep bowl and pour water into it. And another important point: to make the smelt more silvery, stored longer and not “rusted”, you need to add one teaspoon of vinegar to the water.
   
5. In a bowl of water and vinegar we put smelt, rinse it well and put it in a colander so that the excess water in the glass before we string it. Smelt is clean, without excess salt. About 10 minutes we will let it drain and we will string it for further drying and drying.
   
6. It is convenient to use thin skewers for barbecue. Threaded through the gills into the mouth, and thus string the smelt. With this method of drying, excess fat does not drain from the smelt through the head, but remains in it. The fish is fatty, juicy. There is no consensus to hang a smelt by the head, or by the tail. You can pierce it in the tail area with skewer.
   
7. We install skewers with a threaded smelt on a structure attached to the wall in the form of two hornets with screws screwed into it to fix the skewers. We push the fish a little so that air passes through it, and leave it for several days. Vyalim until ready. It will fade for 3-4 days, maybe 5. It all depends on the temperature and humidity in the room, on the degree of ventilation. The exact drying time is hard to say. We look after the fact. Someone likes her to be soft, and someone that she is completely hard. All individually.
   
8. You can hang smelt to dry on the street, if weather conditions permit. After our smelt is sufficiently dried up, it will be an ideal beer snack. It will be lightly salted, tasty.You will taste the fish, not the salt. In the process of preparation, we will take a sample and watch when all this is prepared. When the fish becomes dense enough, well dried out, covered with a crust (but not salt) - the beer snack is ready.
   

Video recipe

This video shows the whole process of making dried smelt.

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