steamed fish chinese-style: another ethnic trick

As part of the foodbuzz project food blog contest,  my first challenge is to define myself as a food blogger, and to do that, there’s no easier way than to share how and why I started this adventure into ethnic cuisine!

Learning to document and prepare food started out as a combination of three passions: culture, French language, and ethnic dishes. My first hand-written recipes come from Mbalmayo, Cameroon, where I rented a room in 2004 for three months (after volunteering around the country for six), staying with a local family for roughly $17 per month. Years earlier, a tree had fallen over and broken half their house down: the washroom had no roof (providing magnificent skylights!); the door was off its hinges and had to be physically lifted to open and close it; the walls were covered in a beautiful melody of weathered paint, and half a papaya tree trunk grew through one of the walls. There was no fridge or running water (the kids would fetch it from a pond or well and carry it back on their heads), and we cooked fresh ingredients from the local market over an open wood fire, complimented with luscious fruits from our trees; a perfect way to expose myself to the local life and recipes as part of the family, while I learned to start speaking French for the first time.

From Africa, I moved to French Canada to continue studying. I started with language classes, but they didn’t work: all my classmates could speak fluently, but had trouble reading and writing; I was the complete opposite. So I came back to my passion, and studied cuisine full-time for one year, where as the only anglophone in the school, I was forced to learn to speak French, and it was much easier to do while studying something I love!

From there, I travelled to French speaking countries in West Africa, learning common comfort foods by staying with friendly local families. This became a full-time research project for over two years, and fifty five countries later, I’ve learned so many practical tips and tricks from Asia, Africa, and Europe that I want to share this insight, so others can see how easy it is to make completely different dishes with familiar, basic ingredients.

What really makes my posts special is the personal touch from first-hand contact with cultures: the recipes are much more than authentic recipes from faraway lands; you get transported to the places and people who taught them to me, sharing a piece of their pride with your own friends and family at the dinner table.

Speaking of dinner, here’s an easy way to create delicious Chinese (and other) steamed dishes on a regular stove top. My friend Yin’s mom was the first to teach me this cooking method in Hong Kong, and I must say, the whole process is simplified in a Western kitchen if you replace the pot I used in this example with a large flat base wok (many woks in Asia actually have a rounded base sitting comfortably over gas flames, which allows you to easily manipulate the food without any edges on the inside).

To transform the wok into a steamer in China, there’s a small metal three-legged stand that sits inside, and can have a plate placed on it. What I use as a substitute is a bowl, half filled with water, placed in the bottom of the wok or pot. The water in the bowl prevents it from shaking or rattling when the heat goes on; this is exactly what can happen if you turn the bowl upside down.

With the bowl (or stand) in place, pour hot water from a kettle around it, filling the pot/wok no more than half-way up the bowl/stand’s height. The higher you fill it, the more likely the water is to boil over onto food being steamed, but if there’s not enough water, it can dry up and burn the pot.

Cover the pot and heat it until boiling, and you are now ready to steam! Below is one of many extremely simple and tasty fish recipes to get you started:

Chinese steamed fish with ginger and spring onions (Yin’s mom’s variation, from Hong Kong)

white whole (or sliced) sea fish (in Africa people often deep-fry denser fish in unhealthy, re-used oil, so I’ve also adapted this recipe to use  mackerel or sardines, pictured below), ginger juliennes, 5cm long spring onion juliennes, peanut or sesame oil (vegetable oil won’t give off the same aroma, but can be used if others aren’t available), salt

– clean fish, dry with paper towel
– place bottom half of spring onions on a plate, then fish, then ginger, salt
– carefully place plate/fish in steamer (this is much easier if the diameter of the pot/wok is significantly larger than the plate; for these photos, we used wooden spoons to place the plate in the pot, then a crazy Mozambican friend took it out with her strong, bare hands! In Chinatowns, you’ll find practical plate lifts.)
– check on the fish after 3-5 minutes, and if you see that the water is boiling over onto the plate, remove it by carefully tipping the plate and allowing the liquid to drain back into the pot, then consider removing some of the liquid from the pot to prevent another flood!
– re-cover, and be careful not to overcook (time depends on fish: the ones in these photos took under 15 minutes from start to finish)
– add spring onion tops to fish, re-steam 1 minute, remove from heat
– heat oil in a small pot or pan, ladle over fish, add touch of soy sauce on plate next to white fish (rather than directly on it), or for denser fish, put the sauce directly over it (I also add a bit of the steamed water to the plate to mix with the soya sauce, creating a nice dip for drier meat and rice)

Enjoy!