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Automatically translated version. May contain inaccuracies compared to the original.
The fish that people at Pryvoz today treat as their own did not exist at all in the Black Sea fifty years ago.
Pelengas is an East Asian mullet. Its natural home is the waters around the Sea of Japan, and it began to be acclimatized to the Azov-Black Sea basin in the late 1970s.
And what no one planned on that scale happened. In the warm Azov Sea pelengas grows three to four times faster than in its native waters. It found a spawning ground, chiefly the Molochnyi Estuary, reproduced, and became a commercial fish. It did not displace the local mullets, loban and syngil: there is enough food for them, and they spawn at different times and in different places.
Now the practical part, because pelengas has one feature that trips up everyone who buys it for the first time.
Scales. They are large, hard, and cling so firmly that an ordinary knife won't remove them. There are two solutions, and both work.
First: scrape with the blunt side of a knife from tail to head under a stream of cold water, and do it patiently.
Second, better: don't scale it at all. Roast the whole fish with the scales on. They will bake into a hard shell that peels off after cooking together with the skin in one motion, taking all the excess with it while the meat underneath remains absolutely juicy.
We recommend the second method. Gut the fish, salt the inside, stuff with lemon rings and dill, and do not brush anything on top.
Two hundred degrees, twenty-five to thirty minutes per kilogram.
Pelengas flesh is firm and white, with few bones, which is why it holds its shape well. You can slice it into steaks without fear of it falling apart.
Serve with roasted tomatoes and garlic oil.
Fifty years is not much for the sea, but it turned out to be enough for the kitchen.
💛Bon appétit.
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