Hungarian · Soup
Halászlé
- Advanced
- 45 min
- roughly 1 of 4 for cost
A quiet dish that lets its main ingredient speak: season well and stand aside.
Ingredients
- 2 kg whole carp, scaled and gutted, filleted with head, bones and fins kept
- 800 g onions, roughly chopped
- 50 g édesnemes paprika (noble sweet, ground)
- 10 g hot ground paprika (erős)
- 1.5 litres water
- carp roe and milt, if present
- 2 hot cherry peppers, halved
- fine salt
The skills inside
Straining & passing through a sieve
Allergen screen
Found: fish
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Cut the fillets into thick pieces, salt them and leave them in the cold while the broth is built.
- Simmer the head, bones and fins with the onion and water, uncovered, until the onion has gone to pulp and the liquid tastes strongly of fish.
- Push the whole lot through a sieve, pressing hard on the solids, then return the red brown broth to the pot and take it just off the boil.
- Stir both paprikas and the cherry peppers into the still broth, salt it, and bring it back only to a lazy simmer.
- Lower in the fish and the roe and cook without a spoon touching the pot, swirling it by the handles, until the flesh parts from the bone.
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the technique it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Straining & passing through a sieve 148 recipes
- Nothing solid got through: a finger drawn through what came out finds no fibre, seed, skin, curd, or grit.
- Where the dish wants body it was worked through rather than left to drip, and the solids left in the mesh are spent and dry rather than still holding liquid worth having.
- It is judged on the tongue rather than by eye: smooth, with no residual grain left behind after the mouthful has gone.
- The mesh was fine enough for the job and held its shape, and nothing bypassed it by going over the rim.
- The yield is close to what went in less the spent solids: not half of it abandoned in the sieve because it stopped running and nobody pushed.
Where it goes wrong It was pushed through a mesh too coarse for it, or the sieve was overloaded and slopped at the rim, so the fibres it was meant to remove are in the finished sauce and it reads grainy on the tongue.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Vermentino or Sauvignon Blanc
- Also Right
- Albariño
- From the Taps
- Witbier
- Zero-Proof
- Sparkling water with citrus
Lean fish, bright acid, done: coastal whites built beside the same boats; the fresher the fish, the leaner the pour.
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