Is Making Your Own Gefilte Fish Worth It?

For many Jews, gefilte fish is the bête noire of the Passover Seder table. It doesn’t have to be that way.

Growing up in an Ashkenazi Jewish American household in the Midwest during the ’80s and ’90s, my earliest Passover memories are not of the story of Exodus but the reality of gefilte fish. It was matzo that was framed as the food of affliction, but to me that seemed both unfair and inaccurate when gefilte fish was sitting right there on the table, as lumpen, beige, and chilled as a medical specimen. That it came to my home encased in a jar of sepia-toned ectoplasm did it no favors.

I didn’t believe gefilte fish came from an actual fish, no matter how convincingly The Carp in the Bathtub suggested otherwise. And it certainly never occurred to me that it could be made in a home kitchen, rather than (as I imagined) some secretive laboratory housed in the darkest recesses of the Manischewitz factory.

So it came as a great surprise when I grew up and discovered that not only could you find gefilte fish that didn’t come floating in suspended animation in a jar full of gelatin, you could also make it yourself. I got my first clue via a Russian-born boyfriend who introduced me to the Brooklyn Russian supermarkets where gefilte fish was sold as a loaf; I found further, incontrovertible proof at Russ & Daughters, the great Lower East Side appetizing store where the gefilte fish is sold in elegant quenelles made from an urbane blend of whitefish and salmon. When, in 2012, the Gefilteria launched with its signature artisanal gefilte fish, the delicate, aesthetically inviting loaf convinced me that it was time to try to make my own.

Gefilte means “stuffed” in Yiddish, a nod to the way that the dish was historically presented: Fish meat was ground and served stuffed inside the skin of the fish. That method of presentation fell out of favor sometime in the 16th century (at least according to Wikipedia); since then, the fish has typically been served in patty or loaf form. Like a lot of foods made of ground-up animal parts, gefilte fish presented as a daunting endeavor for the home cook, even an experienced one. So I went to an expert.

Joan Nathan is the generally recognized queen of Jewish home cooking, one who began her ascendance in the 1970s and has 13 cookbooks to her name, the most recent of which was published last year. (I once had a six-hour job interview at her home, but that’s another story.) Nathan has multiple gefilte fish recipes, but the one I used calls for making the fish in patty form. First, you make a light vegetable stock with yellow onions, carrots, celery, fennel, and black peppercorns — this will be used for poaching the fish. Next, you haul out the food processor, and that’s where the fun begins, because now it’s time to make the fish. You do this by chopping up some onions, carrots, and celery, the latter of which I omitted because I hate celery, and then adding 2 pounds of raw fish to the food processor. Nathan is flexible on the fish you use — she recommends a mixture of skinless white-fleshed fish and salmon — and I used a 1-3 ratio of cod to salmon. Along with the fish you add chives and sundry fresh herbs, and then pulse the mixture until the fish is chopped but — and this is important — not mushy. Once you’ve got the consistency you’re looking for, you transfer the mixture to a bowl and combine it with matzo meal, eggs, and vegetable oil. Then you shape the patties. This is easily the most labor-intensive part of the process, unless you’re the kind of person who likes to skin and bone your own fish, since shaping the patties is a messy endeavor, and god help you if you’re a cook who likes to lick your fingers as you go.

Once the patties are shaped, you add them to your now-simmering vegetable stock and cook them gently for 20 minutes, or until they’re firm.

And that’s it.

I was speechless, first because I had no idea that making gefilte fish at home was this easy, and then because I could not stop eating it.

That was about 15 years ago. I’ve made my own gefilte fish every year since. While Nathan’s recipe remains a favorite, I’ve also strayed from it: There were what I refer to as the Bundt years, when I made my gefilte fish in a Bundt pan (highly recommend, though unmolding it from the pan takes both dexterity and above-average wrist strength), and for the past few years, I’ve made repeated use of Leah Koenig’s recipe in Modern Jewish Cooking. It’s similar to Nathan’s in that you poach the fish patties in a vegetable broth, but Koenig gooses her broth with white wine, herbs, garlic, a leek, and a thinly sliced lemon to make a court bouillon. There’s likewise a little lemon zest in the fish, which adds a bright ray of citrus, as well as dried thyme and oregano. What you get is still gefilte fish, but with greater complexity; it’s like gefilte fish with a Criterion Channel subscription.

All of which is to say yes, homemade gefilte fish is absolutely, positively, 1,000 percent worth it. In addition to being a universe better than the jarred stuff (which I’ve grown to appreciate in a Stockholm syndrome sort of way), it’s really not that difficult to make. If you own a food processor, have a tolerance for handling raw fish, and know a decent fishmonger who will skin and bone your fish for you, you can do this. You’ll be rewarded with Passover food you wouldn’t mind eating all year, as well as the gratifying disbelief of whomever you serve it to. A great many people still have no idea that you can actually make your own gefilte fish, and therefore behold it as some kind of bizarre but benevolent party trick. In this sense, DIY gefilte fish is as much an educational tool as a food. You can use it to show the world that better gefilte fish is possible, and it starts at home.