Ingredients

• Pike head - 600 grams
• Potatoes - 200 grams (4 medium potatoes)
• Carrots - 100 grams
• Onions - 50 grams
• Greens (any to taste)
• Spices (bay leaf, peppercorns)
• Salt - 1 teaspoon

To prepare fish soup from a pike head, you need the head of one large pike or several small ones. For the preparation of the dish in the photographs, a head of about 600 grams was used.

First, you need to wash your head, remove the gills and eyes. Then put in a saucepan and fill with water so that the head is completely under water, the amount of water is about 1.5 - 2 liters. Put the saucepan on a low heat. Immediately add salt to the water with your head - 1 teaspoon, and spices: bay leaf - a few leaves and black peppercorns - a dozen pieces.

After the water begins to boil, foam begins to form, it must be removed with a spoon and discarded. In principle, this is not necessarily foam, it is not harmful and does not affect the taste of the fish soup in any way, but if you do not remove it, then the ear will turn out cloudy and not so beautiful on the plate.

When the foam stops forming, then the head is already cooked and it must be removed from the pan and left to cool on a plate. The approximate cooking time can be estimated at 40 - 50 minutes from the moment of boiling.

While the head is cooling there is time to prepare the vegetables. For fish soup you will need:

• 4 medium potatoes, they need to be peeled and cut into strips, you can slices as you like, the thickness should not be large, it is worth focusing on half a centimeter;
• 1 carrot - it also needs to be peeled and cut with wheels;
• half an onion (or a small whole) - cut into cubes.

All vegetables must be placed in a saucepan and cooked for about 15-20 minutes.

While the vegetables are boiling, you need to cut the head and separate the meat from the bones. Honestly speaking, this is the most time-consuming and difficult to prepare fish soup from pike heads. In the pike's head, there are practically no small bones, everything that is large enough and well-cooked meat is easily separated from them. The meat from the head is about 2 times less than bones, cartilage and skin by weight.

In general, it will take just as much time to separate the meat as it takes to cook potatoes, carrots and onions.

Next, you need to pour the meat into the ear and add the greens. Any will do: onion, parsley, celery, cilantro. It is worth noting that greens are not an obligatory component of the fish soup - you can do without it. It is worth adding greens when the dish is ready, so that it remains beautiful and gives aesthetics to the ear, and does not have time to boil down and become a brown mass.

Exactly according to the same recipe, you can cook fish soup from a whole pike or from heads and tails (those parts of fish that are problematic to use in other dishes, but in no case should not be thrown away).