Food - Drink
Why You Should Use A Milk Marinade When Cooking Fish
By ANABELLE DOLINER
If you love to cook with seafood, you've likely dealt with fish that smells, well, fishy. These unpleasant aromas are inevitable and often occur long before the fish spoils; however, you can effectively combat this fishy smell by soaking your protein in milk before cooking, leaving it clean-smelling and -tasting.
This trick works because of the chemical processes that occur when the fish are killed. When a fish dies, the compound trimethylamine oxide breaks down into trimethylamine, which results in a fishy aroma, but milk contains casein, which bonds with trimethylamine and draws the stinky smell out of the fish.
Before cooking, let the fish spend about 20 minutes sitting in milk to absorb any unwanted odors, then simply drain the fish and pat it dry. If there’s no milk on hand, another way to get rid of fishiness is to top the seafood with lemon juice before cooking, which will also add a lemony flavor to the final dish.