How to Kill, Clean, and Steam a Whole Fish (清蒸鱼)

Whole steamed fish in the Cantonese style, plus how to attack a whole, living fish.

So the timing for this was like perfect this week… yesterday /u/Theoderic77 was asking for some fresh fish recipes, and last weekend we just so happened to film what we feel to be one of the best ways to eat a super-fresh fish – Cantonese whole steamed fish.

So right off the bat, I’ll admit that we’re insanely spoiled living over here in China. If you’re unaware, usually the fishmongers here keep their fish alive in tanks, then take it out and kill it right when you buy it. The fish’s just so much fresher than those fillets I’d buy back in the States, it can’t help but make me wonder why as consumers we don’t demand that sort of approach from our seafood supply chain.

And then because the fish are kept alive in tanks, a relatively common practice among the older generations in China is to simply buy the fish… alive. Often the best fish are available early in the morning and sell out by mid-day, so if you’re eating fish for dinner you’d hardly wanna keep a dead fish in the fridge for eight hours, as it’ll lose some freshness during the day. Keep the fish in your sink, kill it before dinner. Logical, yeah?

So for this video we wanted to show you guys not only how to steam the fish, but also how to kill and prep it. I figured that usually a normal person’s best source for fresh fish outside of Asia is probably your own fishing pole, so maybe this would be a good two-for. Or maybe not. If you don’t care about learning how to kill and prep the fish, just join in at 1:51 in the video and the second part of the process below.

Basic Ingredients

1. One flaky white fish (preferably an ocean or estuary fish), Seabass (海鲈) is perfect. You can use any sort of fish you like, but generally I prefer ocean or estuary fish. These fish are generally much, much less boney than river or lake fish - if you’re like me, it’s easy enough to eat around large spine and rib bones… but there’s nothing pleasurable about taking a big bite of fish and having it filled with pin bones. My go-to fish is here is Seabass (海鲈), because (1) it’s not really boney at all (2) it’s pretty big, the taste is good, and it has a nice quantity of meat and (3) the price is reasonable for me, usually about 元25-30 (~$4) from my local market. I know you can usually get this sort of fresh fish in Chinatowns around the Northeast of the USA at least, but you might need to pay a pretty penny ($15-20 IIRC) for it.

2. Ginger (姜), about an inch. Julienne this ginger, preferably a bit finer than I did in the video. We’re going to be steaming the fish with the ginger, and that’s gunna basically be it for our seasoning.

3. Green onions (葱), roughly 5-6. These green onions are going to be used for two purposes: first, a couple will be placed under the first to help aid in air circulation while steaming. Second, we’ll make some green onion curls with the remainder for garnish. The garnish’ll look a bit prettier is you only use the white part of the green onion, like we did in the video.

Ingredients for the Sauce:

1. Boiling water, 5 Tbsp. Similar to what we did for Mapo Tofu, the boiling water will help the sugar and stock concentrate dissolve.

2. Stock Concentrate (鸡汁), 1 tsp. What we mean by concentrate is the bottled stuff. A plain western-style ‘broth concentrate’ like Savory Choice is a totally fine sub. You could alternatively use chicken stock in the place of water/concentrate, but unlike Western cooking a good stock’s generally not overly critical to the overall flavor of the dish (unless you’re making a soup, of course).

3. Light Soy Sauce (生抽), 3 Tbsp. The biggest mistake that I see when people make this sauce is using far too much soy sauce. The basic ratio here is five parts stock, three parts soy sauce, and one half part sugar. That’ll get you to the taste that the restaurants have.

4. Sugar, ½ Tbsp.

5. Liaojiu, ½ Tsp a.k.a. Huangjiu, Shaoxing Wine, Chinese Rice Cooking Wine.

6. Sesame Oil, 1 Tsp. When I’m making this for myself I’ll often double the sesame oil, just because I fucking love sesame oil.

Process for Storing, Killing, and Cleaning the Fish:

1. Put the fish in your sink or a really large basin. An actual fish tank is perfect if you’re looking to store the fish for a bit, but a sink’s great if you’re a normal person and don’t happen to have an extra fish tank laying around. Every hour or so drain some water from the sink and refill it to make sure the fish has enough oxygen.

2. Kill the fish with a heavy cleaver, or some sort of other heavy object. Unless you’re some sort of super-experienced, badass old Chinese fishmonger… you’re gunna want a pair of rubber fish gloves. Fish can get quite slippery, so the last thing you wanna to is lose grip on the fish and turn your kitchen into something out of a Tarantino movie. Firmly grab the fish and give it a strong smack it on the side of the head with the heavy part of the side of the cleaver. This knocks the fish unconscious but it isn’t dead yet. Flip it 90 degrees and give it another strong smack on the head right above the eyes – that breaks the skull, and that’ll do the trick.

3. Cut along the belly, get the guts out, then cut out the gills. You don’t want to cut too deep, as you don’t want to end up puncturing any organs (which would make it bitter). This’ll basically form a bit of a ‘pocket’ from your cut to the spine, which is where all the organs are. Reach in there, get your hands dirty, and pull out all the crap that’s inside. Once you’re sure that you got all the guts out, right next to the fish’s cheek there’s the gills – cut those out with a knife.

4. Scale the fish. You can use the back of a knife, but vastly easier is using a fish scaler. Scrub the fish with the fish scaler, and be sure you do a good job getting all the sides of the fish. Sometimes I’ve seen people forget the head or behind the fins.

Process for Steaming the Fish:

1. Lay the fish on a large plate on top of two thick sprigs of green onion, then spread the julienned ginger on top of the fish. It’s a little hard to describe the exact location of the green onion – take a look at 2:12 in the video for a visual. The reason for the green onion is because fish is too big for a steamer, so we’re going to be using the plate method to steam. The green onion elevates the center of the fish to ensure the bottom of the fish cooks through as well.

2. Start boiling some water in your steamer, then combine the ingredients for your sauce. Take five tablespoons of water from the steamer and combine with the soy sauce, the sugar, the liaojiu, and the sesame oil.

3. Julienne the remainder of the spring onions, then put them in a glass of ice water. To make your green onion curls for garnishing later on, one trick is to take the finely julienned green onion and put them in a glass of water. The green onions’ll basically curl up immediately.

4. Steam the fish, four and a half minutes per pound of fish. Make sure the water’s boiling rapidly, then set your plate on a steaming rack in a big wok. For us, our fish took five minutes.

5. Remove the fish, then drain out any liquid on the plate. You’ll know the fish is done once the eye has popped out. If you wanna be extra sure (e.g. if you’re feeding other people), poke a chopstick through the thickest part of the fish – if it goes through without resistance, it’s done. Then, drain out any liquid that the fish has released during steaming. I’ve seen some English language recipes that claim that this is the base for the sauce, which is absolutely bonkers – that liquid is about as bitter as bile.

6. Lay the green onion curls over the fish, then pour some piping hot oil over the fish and the green onions. Drain out the oil. Make sure your oil’s really hot here – the hot oil’s gunna soften up the green onions and give us a nice sheen on the fish. I like to use peanut oil here because if there’s any vestiges of oil in the fish after draining, it’ll sort of combine with the flavour of the sesame oil in the sauce.

7. Pour the sauce around the fish on the plate. Don’t pour the sauce over the fish – that wouldn’t really do much flavour-wise and would just kind of make the thing uglier. The sauce will be for (1) dipping the fish pieces in and (2) soaking the bottom side of the fish.

A note on equipment:

To steam this, we placed a steaming rack in a wok and then put the put plate on top. If you don’t have one (you should buy one, it’s like the easiest way to steam stuff), you can Macgyver one pretty easily by crossing a few chopsticks in a round-bottomed wok.

Your lid should fit snugly on your wok, so be sure that your fish and/or your steaming plate isn’t bigger than your wok. If you fish is slightly bigger than you wok, it’s not the end of the world – cut off as much of the tail as is needed with kitchen scissors. It won’t look as pretty, but you’ll survive.

A note on how to eat whole steamed fish:

A lot of people I think are interested in eating whole steamed fish, but some people don’t really know how to attack it.

First off, if you’ve steamed something like Sea Bass and are eating it with chopsticks, you don’t have to worry about bones. For the most part, just go at it and pick pieces off with your chopsticks – let’s just say that ripping the fish’s large vertebral bones from the spine would take some effort, and you aren’t going to be doing that by accident.

That said, take a look at this picture. I categorized three ‘eating areas’ of the fish.

The primary part you’re going to be eating is the fillet, which is section ‘1’ of the fish. When you’re eating a fish in the West, this is basically what you’re eating. A cool thing about a whole fish though is that you can keep on munching to the tail, which basically has the same texture.

The best part of the fish is the cheek, section ‘2’. This meat is super tender… it’s like the filet mignon of fish. Obviously, if you were trying to get at that with a fork it’d be a bit of a pain, but it’s super easy to pick out with some chopsticks.

In my personal opinion, the ‘meh’ part of the fish is the belly, section ‘3’. Now you can absolutely eat this – the fattier meat is prized by some Chinese people - but the texture’s a little slimy and you’ll need to pick around a couple bones. I’ll usually just eat a couple of the bigger chunks of meat here.

So… should you eat the skin? Eh… if you feel like it. If I accidentally grab some skin along with a nice chunk of fish meat, I’m not going to go out of my way to not eat it. There’s some really nice crispy fish skin dishes that they make in Guangdong, but the skin of a steamed fish isn’t really anything to get too excited about.

Once you’re done one side, flip it over. “Oh no mthmchris! Someone told me Chinese people think it’s bad luck to flip a fish!” I’ve lived here for nine years, and haven't once encountered someone that actually believes that. Maybe it’s a super location-specific sort of thing, I dunno. But regardless... flip the fish and eat the other side of it.