Cantonese Steamed Fish with Ginger and Spring Onion
CANTONESE · CHINA

Cantonese Steamed Fish with Ginger and Spring Onion

清蒸魚MainRice & noodles

When a Cantonese cook wants to show you respect, they steam you a whole fish. Sweet flesh, slippery-hot ginger oil, and a soy sauce that tastes far bigger than its three ingredients.

Total
35 min
Heat
1/5
Serves
4

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Flavour profile

Heat
Funk
Acid
Richness
Umami
  • Fresh
  • Ginger
  • Silky
  • Umami

The real deal

Region
Guangdong, the Pearl River Delta; the home-style 'qing zheng' way with a whole live fish.
Technique
Steam the fish hard and fast over boiling water, pour off the cloudy juices, then scorch ginger, spring onion and coriander with smoking oil.
We kept
Whole fish, ginger and spring onion, the seasoned soy sauce and the sizzling oil poured at the table — no batter, no cream, no citrus.

Ingredients

4 Serves

fish

  • 700 g · whole, scaled and gutted
  • 1 tsp
  • 1 tbsp

Aromatics

  • 60 g · half coins, half fine julienne
  • 6 · two bruised, four shredded fine
  • 20 g · optional · with roots if you can get them

finish

  • 4 tbsp

Sauce

  • 3 tbsp
  • 2 tbsp
  • 1 tsp
  • ½ tsp

Method

  1. Pat bone dry inside and out with kitchen paper. Lay it on the board and cut 2 cm slashes on both sides down to the bone, spaced a hand's width apart. Rub 1 tsp and 1 tbsp into the skin and into the belly cavity and leave it 10 min while you get everything else ready. Slice half the into thin coins for the bed and cut the rest into the finest julienne you can manage. Bruise 6 with the flat of a cleaver and slice the rest lengthwise into fine shreds; put the shreds in cold water so they curl. Keep the two lots apart.

    A bone-dry fish steams clean and sweet; a wet one spits cloudy water into the plate.

  2. Warm 3 tbsp , 2 tbsp , 1 tsp and ½ tsp in a small pan just until the sugar dissolves, then take it off the heat. Taste: it should be savoury first, sweet only in the echo.

    Neutral soy, sweet but not cloying — it is a seasoning for the fish, not a glaze.

  3. Line a heatproof plate that fits your steamer with the bruised spring onions and the ginger coins — this lifts the fish off the plate so the steam reaches its belly. Sit the seasoned fish on top. Get the steamer going hard before the fish goes anywhere near it: the water must be at a rolling boil and the steam must be dense enough to scald your hand above the pot.

    A cold steamer or a plate that traps the fish flat against the bottom gives you rubber and puddles.

  4. Steam the bedded fish over high heat with the lid pressed down. For a fish this size it needs about 8 min; the flesh at the bone should come away in glossy white flakes and the eye should be opaque and bulging, not sunken.

    The moment the flesh is just set, pull it — another two minutes turns silky into chalky.

  5. Slide the fish onto a clean warm plate, tilting it so every drop of cloudy liquid runs off, and throw away the ginger coins and spring onion bed. Those juices taste muddy and they will dilute the sauce.

  6. Lay the julienned ginger and the curled spring onion shreds along the spine of the fish. Spoon seasoned soy sauce around the fish, not on top of it, so the flesh stays glossy, not drowned.

  7. Heat 4 tbsp in a small pan until it just begins to smoke, then pour it straight over the ginger and spring onion shreds. They should spit and shout and smell sweet and toasted. Scatter over and serve immediately.

    Do this in front of the people eating; the sizzle is half the dish.

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