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In Russia they have salted fish - Balyk and Vobla. Never salted it myself, but I didn't find the result too offputting either; it goes well with beer.
by MichaelMoser123 5y ago
In Russia they have salted fish - Balyk and Vobla. Never salted it myself, but I didn't find the result too offputting either; it goes well with beer.
- krisoft 5y agoThe russian salted fish appears to be very different from garum. With Balyk you salt the fish-flesh to make it dry out and to conserve it. Then you eat the dry fish. Do i see that right? With garum you salt the fish to drive a fishy liquid out of it then you ferment this liquid. The end product is the fermented fish-juice which is used as a condiment. Both involves fish and salt but they appear to be very different beasts. About how offputing garum is: obviously it wasn’t offputting for the romans. They consumed huge ammounts of it. That doesn’t necessarily means that the production wasn’t offputting. After all it is basically letting a pile of fish rot in a controlled manner. By all accounts i have read they produced it at industrial scale outside of the cities not in people’s homes. The other problem one might run into is that the exact art of the process needs reverse engineering. Imagine if all you would read about cheese making is a few paragraphs. Further imagine that you have never eaten cheese nor you know anyone who has ever did. Good luck figuring out where to start making chesse, let alone if what you got at the end is good cheese. This means that while real garum was definietly not offputting to romans, the process of experimenting with producing it now might be. And at the end you might end up with something weird and you won’t know if you just haven’t acquired a taste for it, or if perhaps it went off so badly that not even a roman would consume it.