How do I stop fresh fish from falling apart while cooking?

Question

We sometimes buy trout from a local breeder who'll get them fresh out of the water for us, and then cook them a few hours later. They taste great, but the flesh tends to fall apart in a way that doesn't happen with fish from the super market. It's often barely even possible to get them out of the pot without them completely coming apart. We tried leaving them in the fridge for a day so they wouldn't be quite as just-killed-an-hour-ago-fresh, but that didn't help.

We usually prepare them by cooking them in simmering (not boiling) water.

Is there some way to prevent this?

Answer 1

I would suggest cooking them in a pasta strainer: http://www.nextag.com/pasta-strainer/shop-html

This way you could pull the strainer away from the water and drain the fish in the strainer. Then pour the fish out of the strainer in one piece instead of trying to lift the fish out of the water.

Answer 2

Something like this is useful:

Photo source

There are a lot of variations on the same theme (including oval strainers)

Answer 3

My first thought is to cook the trout less time. When the fish is just done, it will not fall of the spine (I think).

Another option is to change the cooking method. I sauté'd a fresh trout (the neighbor had caught it) with good result.

Answer 4

Fish is delicate. So boiling it (you don't say how long for) for more than even a minute or two is going to cause it to disintegrate. How about cooking it a different way?

Answer 5

The best way to cook fresh fish is to put it into a plastic bag with as little air as possible (there are vacuum sealers available for that, but manually squeezing air out of the bag should work too), and place it in a water bath.

The plastic bag is necessary to prevent water access to fish while cooking. You need to keep temperature of that water at 132 Fahrenheit (55.5 Celsius), not less, not more (at 145F it'll already be overcooked). Depending on how thick is the piece it might take from ~20 minutes (half-inch thick) to couple hours (~2 inches thick) to make sure the entire piece was brought to this temperature (especially important if starting with not fresh, but frozen fish). After that you could just fry it for 30 seconds on each side to give it familiar "fried" (or use a propane torch from Home Depot) slightly "brown" look.

If you don't want to mess with plastic bags and keeping water temperature precise, still using a digital thermometer with a needle type sensor will help a lot in any cooking. The "doneness" of fish (and meat) depends only on what temperature you brought it during the process.

If currently you're simmering it — temperature is way above 132. It's most likely close to 220. Means — severely overcooked.