Fish Sauce: My Second Batch, plus bottarga

I just finished filtering two gallons of salted herring. They'd been aging for over a year now, and the last few weeks were at temperatures of 95-105ºF.

Great flavor in this batch, nice color too. Still have 7 gallons brewing, including a blend of albacore/salmon/herring.

I also added a picture of my halibut bottarga.
The things you can do with salt!

Wow ! That is some dedication to follow a process for a year.

That halibut looks like it would be great with beer amongst other things .

Alex

Halibut bottarga is great, as is ling bottarga. I botched the eggs sacks on the only female halibut I got this year so I'll have to wait to make some more. It's so good on pasta or scrambled in eggs. Yum!

Cheers,
Brad

Halibut bottarga is great, as is ling bottarga. I botched the eggs sacks on the only female halibut I got this year so I'll have to wait to make some more. It's so good on pasta or scrambled in eggs. Yum!

Cheers,
Brad

I've punctured egg sacks before and gone ahead and salted them down with no problems. Yes, it is quite good on pasta, eggs, potatoes.

Wow ! That is some dedication to follow a process for a year.

That halibut looks like it would be great with beer amongst other things .

Alex

There's not much to it. Salt em down in gallon jars, and tuck them away, preferably in a warm place. Check it every so often to make sure it's not spoiling or molding (never happened to me so far).
The filtering is the big process. You just need space and time. It takes several days to strain it all through the cotton towels.

Very nice!

Wow you make your own fish sauce.

Spoon of fish sauce. 2 spoons of lemon juice. Mix together and use as dipping sauce for grilled salmon skin eaten with white rice. The bomb! Andrew👍

Making fish sauce/garum is fun! It's also a great way to up your kitchen game and use more of the fish you catch. Anchovy garum may be the best, followed by salmon. Herring is good, too, and scallop garum has a unique flavor. Currently I am fermenting 10 gallons of albacore scraps from a friend (who was more interested in the meat, understandably).

With several batches of garum I have added apple cider and/or koji rice for some extra complexity.

Has anyone out there tried making fish sauce from the guts of white-fleshed fish -- rockfish, lingcod, halibut, etc? (I've been using guts and heads from those species to make garden fertilizer -- a whole different type of fermentation. The smell was so powerful at first that it attracted vultures, and I won't be using those buckets to make cider anymore!)

Alastair