Fishing Sea

Bought some smoked eel at the weekend and am looking for some suggestions about the best way to eat it.
It looks tasty, just not sure what to do with it!
Yummy! Lots of lovely ideas, thank you so much! I don't know which to try first!

Well, one very interesting recipe that I have actually tried and LOVED with this exotic food is:

Smoked Eel Salad:

100 grams smoked eel
2 large handfuls of lettuce
2 small potatoes
6 cherry tomatoes
1 small shallot, chopped finely
a few small pickles (gherkins)

For the sauce:
1/4 cup capers
1 small clove of garlic
1 tsp grain mustard
1 heaping Tbs crème fraîche
1 Tbs mayonnaise
juice of 1/2 a lemon
freshly ground pepper
2 small pickles (gherkins)

Cut the potatoes in small cubes and set to boil. In the meantime, put all the sauce ingredients in a food processor or the cup attchment for your handblender and whizz until smooth. Taste and adjust with pepper and lemon juice to taste. Clean the salad and tomatoes and spread them on a plate.

I wasn't sure whether smoked eel needed to be cooked (some smoked things do not!) but when I opened the package it looked...raw. I put a bare teaspoon of olive oil in the bottom of a frying pan and heated it before adding the eel. Next time, I'll skip the olive oil entirely as it turns out that eels are extremely oily and although much more tender than bacon cook in a similar way. They give up an enormous amount of grease and have a tendency to curl in an endearing way. Also, I started out thinking 100 grams would be twice as much as I would need and in fact it was just right for one salad.

Drain the eels well on paper towels. Drain the potatoes (providing they are done!) and then scatter the eel pieces and potatoes over the salad. Sprinkle with the shallot and drizzle with the sauce. Garnish with the pickles.

The eels were extremely tender with the texture of a delicate fish, such as sole. The flavour was, well, smoky and fishy. The smokiness was superb with the bland warm potatoes as a foil and the sharp shallots added a tang. The caper sauce was superb with everything. I was afraid that - as sometimes happens in salads - the lettuce would end up being just a platform for the other ingredients to rest upon. I was wrong, though: it tasted great with the sauce and became an integral part of the whole.

All in all, I enjoyed the dish and I hope that this post helped you!!

2009-05-12 10:07:10 by PhoebeR

I'm going to buy a 55 gallon tank and I would like a fire eel in it. I have read that it will both dig up the plants but not kill them, and that it will not cause any damage at all.

if you can include lot of other cover (so he doesn't have to dig, flower pot bottoms, driftwood, slate, etc) he should be pretty alright with most plants...

as they grow they learn there's no need to hide and become more and more active during the day...

you can also attach plants like java ferns, java moss, anubias and other swordplants to pieces of driftwood and rock keeping them out of uprooting's harm..

you can also silicone rocks to the bases of fake plants to at least keep them from floating around, if you go all the way around the base you don't even need to root them in the gravel at all...

2008-04-30 15:50:20 by Matt G

I just got some flowerhorn fry from the petstore, and I was wondering, when it grows up, would it do ok with the eel and bichir (I'm only planning on keeping one of the fry once they grow up)? I know flowerhorns are really aggressive...are the females any less aggressive? I'm currently keeping the fry in a breeder net, and the eel and bichir are in a 55 gallon.

You're probably gonna want to upgrade the 55 soon, especially if you keep the Flowerhorn with them. A Flowerhorn, male or female will tear right into either of those at the first sign of territorial encroachment. I wouldn't keep a Flowerhorn with ANY other fish unless you intend for them to be a meal...

2008-01-20 18:29:03 by Zhaiden

I recently purcahsed a peacock eel and it stays buried in the gravel. Is this normal? I am also not sure what to feed it. Will it eat fish food?

Yes, they like to be buried. No they will not eat normal flake fish food. You need to give them frozen blood worms, glassworms or something along that line. They can be picky eaters.

2008-02-26 06:46:43 by greta o

I recently purchased a peacock eel and stays buried in the gravel. I am not really sure what to feed it. I am worried about it staying buried. Is this normal?
I recently purchased a peacock eel which is staying buried in the gravel.. Is this normal? I am not sure what to feed it neither.

Yes, they are shy and like the dark, quiet and secure-feeling spots in your tank. I thought I'd lost a Reed fish once, but he'd actually managed to swim DOWN a bubbling lift tube to lurk in the muck under the undergravel filter's bottom plate. I fixed this undesireable shyness by grilles on the lift tube nozzles. To keep him happy, I put a 6" transparent acrylic tube in the tank and he hangs out there, comfortably mistaken that he's out of sight.
About eels-they'll escape from even the tiniest gap or space imagineable, so you must have a secure cover/lid/canopy. Trust me-I lost Lenny and Squiggy, two tiretrack eels this way.
They'll eat flake food, but watch out for brine shrimp-the eels have small mouthparts and don't do too good with the hard shells of the mature brineshrimp.
Good Luck!

2008-02-26 06:42:38 by greta o

I've been cooking lots of things lately, but my family has been branching off into different exotic foods. I know most fish have an 8-10 minute rule per inch of thickness, along with the flaking rules as well, but, my question is, does Eel follow this rule as well? Is there a best way to tell when your eel is cooked to perfection?
For clarification, I'm planning to fillet the eels, so none of the meat will be on the eel bones (need the bones to make a broth as it is).

About 10 minutes of boiling

2008-09-08 21:23:47 by Scholar-Cook In Training