A real retro beach dish, a favourite fresh catch for summer fishing, which can be simply grilled on charcoal after fishing. It's also readily available from fishmongers, yet it's not eaten much - and bream is good to eat!
Bream is actually a collective noun. All species of fish in the family Cyprinidae, a class of ray-finned fish and order of carp, share the common characteristic of a very flat body and spiny flesh. If it's not a nice fat carp, but a flatter fish with spines, why is this freshwater fish such a delicacy?
The bream fryer is a concept
Even in the world of buffets and paper-tray canteens, the bream fry, there is also a freshwater fish oven called Keszegsütő in several towns. Although their restaurant in Budapest closed after the pandemic, they still operate in Nyíregyháza, Miskolc and Salgótarján.
Even as street food, there is serious competition for the breeders. It's much more fashionable to offer burgers, fry the evergreen lángos or serve the sea bream that has taken over Hungarian buffets on the waterfront, but despite all this, bream cooked in paprika flour is still popular beach food.
It's well known that the biggest part of our annual freshwater fish consumption is summer chowders, Christmas chowders and other festive fish fries. Bream are also at the top of the list when it comes to popular and affordable freshwater fish, and bream can also be caught from our natural waters - rivers and lakes. (For novice anglers, bream is a very quick success, and is therefore, to put it mildly, a despised catch.) From a culinary point of view, the most valuable, or tasty, is the crucian carp, the most common in our country being the bream.
The easiest way to get them frozen
Continuous, reliable supply is another matter. In the domestic catering sector, buffets and restaurants work almost exclusively with imported bream: the main importers of bream from foreign farms are Ukraine, Romania and Kazakhstan.
The most convenient and reliable way is to buy frozen, but bream can also be bought fresh all year round (and at around half the price, under 1000 forints per kilo). Thaw the gizzard shad slowly, as this preserves the ideal, moist texture of the flesh.
Why shouldn't we be afraid of bream spines? The secret of the grinding
If there's an objection to bream, it's its splinteriness. But this can be easily overcome by skinning the fish before frying. Perpendicular to the backbone, the skin of the fish should be cut into the flesh at a thickness of about 3 mm, right up to the backbone, taking care not to cut through the flattened fish. The dense, careful trimming cuts the so-called Y-strands crosswise. If you use a good knife to cut across the barbs with a deft, firm motion, you will hear a small crunching sound. The cross-cut splinters are no longer noticeable after frying.
From here, you just need to salt and coat in paprika flour before frying. A good roasted bream is crispy and cooked through, but not soaked in fat or dried out during frying (for this, it is good to submerge it in fat or oil). The carefully trimmed flesh can be easily removed from the backbone, and the crispy tail is not left on the plate, it can be eaten. Bream is not just the roast of the summer season!
