{"id":583,"date":"2008-01-18T16:29:00","date_gmt":"2008-01-18T16:29:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scientopia.org\/blogs\/goodmath\/2008\/01\/18\/friday-recipe-cantonese-steam-fish\/"},"modified":"2016-12-14T14:20:35","modified_gmt":"2016-12-14T19:20:35","slug":"friday-recipe-cantonese-steam-fish","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/2008\/01\/18\/friday-recipe-cantonese-steam-fish\/","title":{"rendered":"Friday Recipe: Cantonese Steam Fish"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m a big fish eater. In general, given a choice about what to eat, I&#8217;m<br \/>\nusually happiest when I get to eat a nice fish. Even now that I&#8217;ve started eating<br \/>\nbeef again, most of the time, I&#8217;d rather eat a nice piece of wild salmon<br \/>\nthan pretty much anything made of beef.<\/p>\n<p>When it comes to cooking fish, I think that there&#8217;s no cuisine that does<br \/>\na better job with fish than Chinese. The chinese style of cooking fish is, in<br \/>\nmy opinion, perfect. It relies on getting <em>really<\/em> good quality, fresh<br \/>\nfish &#8211; and then doing as little to it as you reasonably can, so that the wonderful<br \/>\nflavor of a really fresh fish comes through.<\/p>\n<p>The best example of that is a Cantonese steamed fish. You do so little to<br \/>\nit &#8211; and yet the result is one of the best dishes in the entire world. To make this<br \/>\nwork, you need a really fresh, smallish fish. I typically do this with either rainbow trout or striped bass, and I try to get it from someplace where I can be sure that the fish was<br \/>\nswimming no more than 24 hours before. The easiest place to find fish like that is usually<br \/>\na chinese grocery; American grocery stores often have fish that&#8217;s been sitting on ice for a long time. Chinese shoppers are, properly, very picky about their fish, so you tend to get it much fresher from a chinese grocery.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><br \/>\n<b>Ingredients<\/b><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li> Two small freshwater fish, gutted and scaled, but <em>not<\/em> deboned, and head-on.<\/li>\n<li> Several cloves of garlic, sliced as thin as possible.<\/li>\n<li> About 1 1-1\/2 inch piece of fresh ginger, peeled and sliced as thin as possible.<\/li>\n<li> 3-4 scallions, green parts chopped, while parts kept whole.<\/li>\n<li> Soy sauce.<\/li>\n<li> Vodka<\/li>\n<li> Sugar <\/li>\n<li> Kosher salt<\/li>\n<li> 1 tablespoon of sesame oil mixed with one tablespoon of canola oil.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><b>Instructions<\/b><\/p>\n<ol>\n<li> Sprinkle the fish generously with kosher salt, and let them sit for about five<br \/>\nminutes in the salt. Then brush the salt away with a rag or paper tower. (This helps<br \/>\ndraw a bit of moisture out of the skin to prepare for what comes next.)<\/li>\n<li> With a very sharp knife, cut 3 angled slits into the side of each fish, parallel to the gills. Do this to both sides of the fish. (For those with dull knife issues, go check out a <a style=\"text-decoration: none;\" href=\"https:\/\/sharpenedknife.com\/best-knife-sharpener\/\"> <span style=\"text-decoration: none; color: #000000;\">buying guide on knife sharpeners<\/span><\/a>, you need a good sharpener before you can have a good knife.)<\/li>\n<li> Stuff the slits with slices of garlic and ginger.<\/li>\n<li> Whack the whites of the scallions with the back-side of your knife, then stuff then into<br \/>\nthe body cavities of the fish.<\/li>\n<li> Put the fish each onto a heatproof plate, and sprinkle with the scallion greens.<\/li>\n<li> Sprinkle each fish with a couple of tablespoons each of vodka and soy sauce.<\/li>\n<li> Add about 1\/2 teaspoon of sugar to the sauce on the bottom of each plate.<\/li>\n<li> Move the plates into a bamboo steamer, and steam the fish until just barely cooked through. For an average rainbow trout, this takes between 8 and 10 minutes; for a bass (which is usually a bit bigger), it&#8217;s more like 10 to 12 minutes. Be careful to <em>not<\/em> overcook the fish!<\/li>\n<li> While the fish is steaming, heat the mixed oils until they&#8217;re smoking hot. Don&#8217;t let<br \/>\nthem burn &#8211; you just want them <em>really<\/em> hot.<\/li>\n<li> When the fish is done, spoon a tablespoon of the hot oil over each of them.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>Serve with rice, and a stir fried vegetable. (Snow-pea greens go extremely well with this.) The soy and vodka will have formed into a nice sauce with the juices from the fish. (This is why you want the head on. The cartilage exposed around the gills really helps to build the sauce. Also, there&#8217;s a little piece of meat just above and to the front of the gills which is called the cheek, which is the most tasty piece of the entire fish.)<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s really it &#8211; some garlic and ginger, some soy sauce, and then steam it. It&#8217;ll be<br \/>\none of the best fish you&#8217;ve ever eaten.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m a big fish eater. In general, given a choice about what to eat, I&#8217;m usually happiest when I get to eat a nice fish. Even now that I&#8217;ve started eating beef again, most of the time, I&#8217;d rather eat a nice piece of wild salmon than pretty much anything made of beef. When it [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":true,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[55],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-583","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-recipes"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4lzZS-9p","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/583","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=583"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/583\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3361,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/583\/revisions\/3361"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=583"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=583"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=583"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}