Chaoshan, usually refers to the coastal area in eastern Guangdong, including the cities of Chaozhou, Shantou and Jieyang. Among them, fish rice (also known as cooked fish rice) is a daily favorite of Chaoshan people, who never get tired of it.
What is Fish Rice? There are several explanations for the origin of the term “fish rice”, but basically it is the way the fish rice is served or the fact that it is widely consumed on a daily basis. Fish as rice is a wonderful thing to eat.
01
How to Make Fish Rice
Except for a little sea salt, it is not complicated to make fish rice, and it relies entirely on the fish itself to bring out the flavor. Traditionally, the fish rice is made from freshly caught fish of low to medium value, and mostly processed whole without scraping or opening the stomach so as to preserve the freshness of the fish as much as possible; of course, some are scraped without opening the stomach, or scraped and cleaned (especially the larger fish).
After pretreatment, the fish are washed with seawater and placed in a basket. In the traditional production method, there are also careful placement, most of them require that the head of the fish to face outward and to the left, and fish stacked fish were arranged in a tight disk. The reason for this is to heat the fish evenly during steaming, to maximize the use of space, and to facilitate the rapid drainage of excess soup when drying later.
Once arranged, the fish are covered with a thin layer of sea salt for a short marinade before cooking; finally, the fish are secured with a heavy object so that they cannot be moved in the basket and cooked in a large pot of water over a high heat for about fifteen minutes.
The water used to cook the fish is not simply tap water, but water seasoned with deep-sea seawater or other proprietary salt formulas. The fish is then quickly run through a basket of hot salted water to wash away any impurities that may have been left behind by the cooking process.
02
How to Eat Fish Rice
How do you make fish rice? The most important thing is the freshness of the ingredients.
In addition, each fish and rice maker has its own techniques to make the fish and rice tasty. There are different ways to do this, such as using a new bamboo basket only once, precisely controlling the cooking and marinating time, choosing a catch that has already been digested in the stomach, and the unique ratio of cooking water mentioned above. Although the taste of the final fish rice varies slightly depending on the technique, the sweetness of the fish with a light saltiness is still the dominant taste of the rice.
Fish rice is often eaten when it is cold and hardly reheated, which is why it is also called “frozen fish”. Don’t think that cold fish tastes bad, but cold fish preserves the freshness of the fish without overflowing, and preserves the sweetness of the fish as much as possible. Although freshly baked hot fish rice is equally delicious, reheating the fish causes some of its sweetness to be lost, so reheating cold fish rice is rarely recommended.
A piece of cold fish, dipped in local bean paste and served with porridge, is so cold, sweet and nutritious that in many cases you can wipe out a whole fish before you know it.
Fish rice is a true test of a fish’s sweetness and freshness. It is quickly cooked in lightly salted water, and no other seasonings or ingredients are introduced to enhance or complement the taste of the fish, so what you taste is almost the flavor of the fish itself.
Some of the fish rice still has some of the cooking broth left on the fish to form jelly, which is the essence of fish soup. Fish rice can be kept for several days at room temperature, and it was loved by many families in the olden days when refrigerators were not available. In the old days, when there were no refrigerators, the fish rice was a favorite of many families. In the past, many fishing boats preserved their excess catch, but when the boat had a large catch and it was impossible to sell or preserve all of it in time, the rice was made into fish, so that the food needs of the people on board could be satisfied and the “fresh” fish could still be served ashore. “Fish Sales.
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