Steaming Whole Fish
When I was a little kid, the centerpiece of every important meal was a whole steamed fish.
At least in our family, Chinese home cooking was quite different from what most people eat in Chinese restaurants. Most of the fancy dishes were steamed and simmered. Fish, shellfish, jelly like things called sea cucumbers, chicken necks and feet, steamed buns, lots and lots of vegetables.
For quick meals, there would be fried things, but generally those weren't prepared for guests. Almost nothing was roasted or baked, very little was stirfried, and there was none of the high heat wokery that we might associate with Chinese cooking.
No doubt much of this reflected my family's own preferences. My grandfather loved fish. But I think it also reflects the realities of life in China, where my grandparents and parents grew up. In much of Asia, even today, kitchens are small and heat sources limited. Often there is no oven, certainly no big burner, and no grill or broiler. But there are food shops everywhere, so if you want a roast duck or baked pastries or flash-seared food from a glowing wok, you go out and buy it. There's home cooking, and there's restaurant cooking, and they are by necessity or tradition, quite distinct.
In America, if we served takeout food as part of a dinner party, that would be considered odd. Among Asian families, at least as far as I know from the lens of my childhood, it is perfectly to serve delicacies from outside.
But the abundant takeout came later. In 1960s and 1970s suburban New Jersey, there wasn't a profusion of Chinese corner eateries. So when we had a big feast, with all the aunts and uncles and cousins, and my grandfather at the head of the table, drinking mao tai and smacking his lips between jokes, most of the food was cooked at home. Fortunately my grandmother was an excellent cook, as were some of my father's generation, and one thing they did really well was steam whole fish.
Familiarity breeds contempt, isn't that the saying? Perhaps for that unworthy reason, I was never interested in making the old standby of steamed fish. When I started cooking with actual intent, I wanted to replicate all the stuff that my cousins and I looked forward to eating in the restaurants. Roast duck, fancy soups, dim sum, and of course the Western food that we kids considered to be the really special stuff. If you grew up on a constant diet of Chinese food, a simple hamburger and fries would be pretty danged impressive, believe me, especially when you only got that once every few weeks.
We have a friend coming over for a really late dinner, and she is a pescatarian. SWMBO and I are also on a healthy eating kick. So I decided to try steaming a whole fish - for the first time.
I have a black cod, unfortunately sans head or tail (SWMBO did the shopping, and she likes her fish as close to patty form as possible). It is too big to fit in my rather small steamers, so it is now two wide and stubby fish. Inside rubbed with salt, pepper, ginger, garlic, scallions. Cuts in the flesh, filled with more of the same. A mix of soy sauce, white wine, spices, and agave sweetener, poured into the openings and injected into the flesh with a turkey baster. I'm going to steam these for, well, I don't know long how, we'll just have to see. Then I have some oil with a little spicy sauce that I'll heat to nearly smoking and pour over the skin, followed by some more soy-wine-agave that will be boiling hot and poured over the fish, just before service.
It looks like this now. I'll let you know if it turns out, good or bad.
Comments (17)
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Comments (12)Salads are the obvious option. If you have a hotplate, you can make steamed dishes. Steaming is a great way to cook fish, veg, rice, etc. Pick up some bamboo steamer baskets. You can also braise - chicken, pork, some beef cuts. Lots of flavor potential with a slow braise in stock +/or wine. See the other thread about microwaving food. I also suggest getting a good toaster oven (everyone seems to love the Breville SmartOven, $250 I think?) which will let you bake, broil, roast and toast. And an electric kettle for boiling water. So, some feasible meals might be: Day 1 - steamed whole fish (a smallish flat one, like a little pompano) with a simple sauce (reduce some teriyaki to thicken) - roasted brussel sprouts or carrots with plenty of olive oil and salt/pepper - salad with a little piquancy (thin sliced cucumbers, marinated in vinegar) or microwave-heated edamame in the shell and sea salt - cold beer Day 2 - chicken parts, roasted then finish off with a little broiler time - steamed brown or wild rice, mix in some toasted almonds or chopped herbs for interest - roasted asparagus (put in when the chicken is part done so they finish together) - white wine Day 3 - gazpacho - Greek salad with plenty of feta - ceviche with fun toppings (minced garlic, toasted nut crumble, diced and salted tomatoes, etc) - bruschetta - a nice chilled rose wine Day 4 - make some sashimi! Or, steam sushi rice, mix with vinegar, sugar, and salt to approximate sushi rice, and make sushi! - miso soup (boil water, miso paste, tofu cubes, chopped green onions, a little chili sauce and ginger) - steam some veg (gai lan, then add plum sauce) - a salad of sliced citrus fruit (orange, grapefruit, kiwi) - some sake Day 5 - braise beef short ribs (or chicken thighs, or pork spare ribs, or oxtail, whatever is fun) in wine, stock, herbs, garlic, onions - baked potato with not too much cheese and sour cream - a pint o Guiness Day 6 - meat pies, dice and microwave the meat, mix with the veg and stock and milk, put in individual oven-safe bowls, top with crust or phyllo or puff pastry (store bought is fine) - there's just the bit of pastry on top, so this isn't very caloric - Caesar salad - more Guiness Day 7 - Go out to eat, splurge on the calories. You'll have eaten well and healthy, except for the booze but that's optional, and will be ready for more fun, improvised meals the next week! -...See MoreSteaming Whole Fish
Comments (8)We JUST had steamed fish (redfish DH and I caught Saturday) last night. OK, this is a flounder from a couple of years ago, but technique is the same: Pictured above in a 13x9x2 dish, for scale. And imagine the head and tail are still on. :) (DH removes both since we don't have a larger dish.) Sorry, I don't have amounts as everything is to taste. Assuming the fish has been properly cleaned (gutted, scaled, rinsed) and refrigerated, cut diagonal slashes every ~ 2" (top and bottom sides of fish). Salt the slits and skin. Mince garlic and chop green onion (for the flounder, ~ 4 medium/lg cloves garlic and 4 green onion stalks). Set aside the upper, green portion of the GO. Ginger: I don't use it because, frankly, my mom put ginger on/in everything and I grew tired of the flavor. Plus, we don't use it often enough that a leftover nub in the fridge doesn't always get moldy. So, I skip. If you want ginger, just slice a couple of 1/8" pieces/medallions, then sliver those. A little goes a long way. Sprinkle half the garlic and GO whites onto the bottom of the pan. Sprinkle light soy all over fish, then place fish onto the dish. Scatter remaining garlic and GO bulb onto top of fish, along with the garlic slivers. Let the fish come to room temp just a bit -- makes for more even cooking. Bring water to a rolling boil, place dish into steamer (carefully!), replace lid, and bring back to rolling boil. Cook time will be ~ 20 minutes. You'll know the fish is done when the meat moves easily off the gone when scooted with a fork. Remove from heat. Drizzle sesame oil over the fish. Distribute green onion stalks onto top of fish. In a separate pan, heat 3-4 Tbsp vegetable oil until shimmery. Drizzle hot oil over the fish/green onion -- should sizzle. That's how we do it, anyway. Enjoy -- happy memories!...See MoreSeven Fishes Dinner for Christmas Eve
Comments (39)Post dinner report. We had about 20 people over for this buffet meal. The idea was to bring out seafood dishes one at a time. Sides and salads were available throughout the meal, and people took plates and sat wherever they wanted at two dining tables, on the living room couch and chairs, or just standing around. As DD and I planned the meal, it started making sense to deviate from the traditional Seven Fishes dinner of full -on entree dishes. Instead, we decided to have every seafood dish more like an appetizer, that you could eat off a small plate with just a fork, so that the evening was more like a cocktail party with endless food. We also decided to keep each dish simple so that preparing seven dishes and serving one every 20 minutes wouldn't be crazy. To the extent possible, we'd prep ahead. When guests started arriving, we had salmon mousse on crostini ready. Two kinds of salmon mousse, because DD objected to my version. I make it by baking salmon, then putting it in the food processor and adding a couple garlic cloves, some shallot, salt and white pepper, heavy cream, a little bit of brie cheese with rind, a pinch of wasabi, lemon zest, processing to the desired consistency and taste, then placing into a squeeze bottle with pastry tip. DD was outraged at the brie cheese, and insisted on making her own version. Which, in the end, included cream cheese :-) Next was a shrimp louie salad. SWMBO made this, so I don't know what was in it. We made a clam fettucine, following a recipe that was so minimalist, it was intriguing. Heat a few garlic cloves in wrote a lot of olive oil, discard the garlic cloves, add clams in shells, cook until shells open, remove shells, extract clam flesh, return clam flesh to oil with parsley, cook a couple minutes more. Yes, that was it. This was a good cookbook, so we thought maybe the stripped-down recipe would bring out the essence of the dish. Turns out it basically yielded clams... in oil - ick. So we used the result as a base for a more full featured clam sauce, which salvaged the dish. DD made oysters in a leek sauce. You shuck oysters, clean the shells, lightly cook oysters to release liquid, combine the liquid, white wine (not too dry - or champagne or Prosecco), and cream into a sauce - there was more to the sauce but I wasn't watching closely - assemble oysters on beds of wilted julienned leek in the shells, broil, then sauce and serve. Meanwhile there was manicotti as well as other side dishes and salads that people brought, on the buffet. I made crab cakes. This was crab meat, minced onion and garlic, parsley, salt and pepper, a little red pepper flake, mixed with boiled and riced potato, molded into patties, dredge in egg and coat in Panko crumbs, then deep fry. A messy thing to do but they came out nicely. Normally I use egg and bread, not potato, as the binding agent, but we were trying a recipe from the Peterson book. It is a cross of crab cake and latke. Personally I prefer the way I usually do it. Then we broiled some halved lobster tails, with plenty of melted butter. We should probably have extracted the meat and cut it to bite size pieces, in keeping with the cocktail party appetizer theme, but by now we'd been cooking for hours and were getting bogged down by guests wandering into the kitchen, helpfully and insistently busing piles of dirty plates and glasses into the midst of our prep and cooking space. So I was having to do dishes while DD cooked, and our smooth process was getting chaotic. That's the drawback of a small kitchen. My new dishwasher requires a particular workflow. One side of the sink is full of soapy water. Dishes are scraped into the other side of the sink (that has a garbage disposal) then placed in the soapy water. When enough dishes have accumulated, they are removed from the water and placed into the rack which is loaded in the dishwasher. After the dishwasher cycle, which takes three minutes, the rack is removed and set on the counter. The dishes and glasses come out very hot so they are dry in a minute. Quickly remove and stack the clean ware. This is an effective way to wash a lot of dishes very quickly, but definitely interrupts cooking. The seventh dish was to have been scallops in lobster butter. We collected the lobster shells and were starting to make the butter, but then SWMBO reported that everyone was full and it was time for tea, coffee, dessert and the White Elephant present game. So we shelved the seventh seafood dish with some relief. There was still a lot of cleaning up to do!...See More- 10 years agolast modified: 10 years ago
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My mom gave me one of these old-time tiered steamers forever ago:
It's perfect for steaming 2-3 of our smaller catches in a single 10" Pyrex deep dish pan (x 2 layers on a good day). I couldn't imagine using a bamboo steamer as all the delicious 'juices' would be lost through the holes/cracks (right?). Retaining the juices was a huge deal in our household, as Mom used it to baste the fish just before serving. She also drizzled it over our rice to make it more flavorful, if we threatened to leave the table w/ rice leftover in our bowls....the horror! ;)
- 10 years agolast modified: 10 years ago
John LiuOriginal Author