Best trout recipes: the top ten recipes for delicious fish

The best trout recipes from The Field show you how to tackle your trout and make something delicious

Top ten trout recipes

The best trout recipes are often overlooked. Salmon seems more succulent, seafood more glamorous. The poor old trout is often left behind. It shouldn’t be. The best trout recipes cater for every taste and every budget, and what is more you can (if you fish on stocked ponds over winter) fish for trout all year round. To find the best rivers to fish in season for your trout try Fishpal, a site that makes it easy and simple to book days on the riverbank.

In our collection of the best trout recipes there are versions that can be adapted (or have been adapted) from their salmon counterparts, such as trout kedgeree or the trout and fennel fishcake recipe. For fast and easy trout a la wok does the job. And for just plain delicious try smoked trout and warm horseradish cream and beetroot salad.

Cooking trout and therefore sourcing the best trout recipes has always been high on the agenda for me ever since my husband arranged a fishing trip to Ireland for our honeymoon in the post-war Fifties, casting a hopeful line over every inch of even the most unpromising lough or stretch of river.

My daughter’s husband followed suit, taking her camping high in the Himalayas in pursuit of the brown trout introduced by homesick British officers during the time of the Raj. Both of us are quite used to packing matches and searching out dry tinder in case of a happy catch; there isn’t much that’s better tasting than a fat, freshly caught trout cooked on the river-bank, sizzling in bacon grease or butter.

Wild Scottish trout come top of the culinary list for their sweet, bright-pink flesh, but even their plumper southern cousins caught in the Itchen or Test are delicious if treated right and used in the right trout recipes.

TROUT RECIPES – WHAT TO COOK WITH TROUT

Often, the ingredients that complement them best are to be found growing nearby: wild fennel, sorrel and ramsons (wild garlic) all go well with fish, and there’s a great deal of satisfaction to be found in foraging for your own herbs.

While you can buy smoked trout, there’s yet further satisfaction to be found in smoking your own, with an Abu Smoker or in a wok, and it’s cheap and quick to do.

Not everyone fishes, but that’s no reason not to eat trout. Farmed fish are available from fishmongers (if you can find one) and supermarkets, but make sure they are fresh. The skin should be shiny, the spots still visible, and eyes unsunken.

Trout is easy to cook, the main rule being don’t overdo it. The following recipes are all tried, tested and almost impossible to muck up for anyone with a grain of cooking common sense.