cooking conger

Joined: Mar 14, 2005 Posts: 1

Hi,
Is it necessary to skin conger before cooking ? If so , any tips other than nailing to a board as you would a freshwater eel ? Took me hours !
Seemingly over here in Ireland eel skin is a folk remedy for arthritis . Trouble is the chap who asked me for it didn't know whether conger would work as well or even what he was supposed to do with it .
N/

Guest

Hi there,

Yes you must certainly skin conger before cooking, and take quite a thick layer off with it. The secret to this is a razor-sharp knife but for goodness sake keep your finders out of the way!!! Try this recipe for 4 of you or reduce the quantities pro rata. The nice thing about this recipe is that there's a bottle of Scrumpy around whilst it's cooking!!!................

Ingredients

4 conger eel steaks about 100G or 4oz each
2 tbsp olive oil, (preferably cold pressed unfiltered)
1 onion, chopped
Seasoned flour for coating
A bottle of good quality dry cider
salt and pepper
thyme
parsley
bay leaf
4 Granny Smith apples
1 tbsp butter
The juice of a small lemon
1 tbs soft brown sugar

Cooking

1. Pree-heat the oven to Gas Mark 6, 400 degrees F , 200 degrees C.

2. Heat the olive oil in a frying pan and cook the onion until soft.

3. Dip the fish steaks in the seasoned flour and add to the pan, browning quickly on each side.

4. Place steaks and onion into an ovenproof dish. Pour over sufficient cider to come halfway up the side of the steaks. Season with salt and pepper. Add thyme, parsley and bay leaf.

5. Bake for 15-20 minutes, basting halfway through.

6. Five minutes before the oven time is up peel, core and slice the apples and fry them in a little butter until soft. Then add the lemon juice and splash of the cider, (if you've drunk it all by now use white wine) and bubble them together gently for a minute or so. Then add the sugar and contine to bubble gently until the sugar is incorporated.

Serve the steaks with the sliced apple mixture and a suitable accompaniment which might be a steamesd vegetable of your choice with mashed potato or, as I prefer, simple plain boiled rice.

Bon apetite...........

Morvargh

Posted: Sun Mar 30, 2008 7:52 pm

conger cutlets fried in butter are good, leave skin on but de-slime as much as poss and cut into 25mm slices down as far as the vent as bony past it ! If you do this on the boat you get lots of slices for those that want and need only kill one fish.If you do skin and fillet it curries well.Straps too bony put em back.

Posted: Fri May 02, 2008 5:46 pm

Skinned, cut up into small cubes(forget area around the stomach, just back and tail) and deep fried quickly in nice golden batter! transforms a nice 10-25lb eel into something that tastes better than commercial scampi!! Use any batter recipe that you can find, they all work! Enjoy.

Posted: Thu May 29, 2008 2:36 pm

if you are not sure about a razor sharp knife just use salt it works just rub the eel with salt on a cloth then wash it after to take the salt off or the eel will be very salty then cook in the normal way enjoy