Steamed Fish with Black Bean Sauce | How to clean and cook whole fish | The Woks of Life

Hi everyone, it's Bill from the Woks of Life. Today I'm going to show you how to make some classic Cantonese dish, steamed fish in black bean sauce. We're going to use a whole steamed fish and we're also going to use a fillet. We're going to incorporate fermented black beans and we also add some garlic to it. This steamed fish with black bean sauce is a nice change over our usual Cantonese steamed fish. The star ingredient of course is the fermented black beans. Yangjiang preserved black beans with ginger. Super aromatic. We have sesame oil, white pepper, regular soy sauce, sugar. You got all these fresh ingredients like the ginger, you got fresh garlic, and scallion. Regarding steaming times for fish, for our whole steamed fish recipe we recommend in the recipe about a pound and a half striped bass, that takes about nine minutes. This branzino is a little bit over a pound, it's a more delicate fish, nine minutes is probably too long. Thin fillets, four to five minutes, maybe even three minutes. But if you got thicker fillets, a little bit longer. It's not the weight of the fish that matters, it's the thickness of the fish. What about the fillet versus a whole fish? Well a whole fish is very round so it's also very thick, so that also matters. Good one. Thank you mama. She has spoken. And that's for free. The prep for this recipe is super simple. So everybody has their own way of cutting ginger. The way I like to do it is I put it into slices, then I julienne it, and then chop it crosswise. A fine chop. A healthy teaspoon for one fish, another healthy teaspoon for another one. Two cloves of garlic. What I do is I smash these. Judy told me when you smash the garlic, all of the antioxidant stuff, all the good stuff comes out. So some health experts say smash the garlic and leave it for 10 or 15 minutes before you eat it. Sort of a fine chop, but I don't want any big chunks. This garlic smells incredible too. One teaspoon. These are healthy teaspoons. That's one, two, and a half. Next, two tablespoons of fermented black beans. Measure these out, give them a quick rinse. I know I'm going to get the question, hey, can I use the black bean with garlic sauce in the jar? Of course you can. The difference is, those black beans are ground, so what happens is that you're going to get sort of a murky sauce. And you're going to get a stronger flavor too. You're going to probably use less of these black beans. With the individual black beans, the dish, first of all, looks cleaner. And then every little black bean that you eat with a piece of fish has a little tiny explosion, which is really nice. Now for the scallions. These scallions are from our garden. They're a little bit thin. That's kind of the way we want them. We're going to do a fine chop. You want to use a sharp knife and best as possible if they can be dry. Next thing, prep the sauce. We're going to measure three quarter teaspoon of sugar. Super important to balance the flavor of the dish. The soy sauce is salty. Everything is nice and savory. I've got a quarter cup hot water, one and a half tablespoons of regular soy sauce. Next thing is, we have eighth of a teaspoon of sesame oil, white pepper, about an eighth of a teaspoon. We're missing the Shaoxing wine. We're not putting Shaoxing wine in here. Really you don't need it. You say, hey, why wouldn't we use clear rice wine, which is I use for a lot of stuff. For clean tasting fish like fillets or a Branzino in this case, it kind of takes away from the freshness of the fish. So we've got our fish fillet here and today we're using cod. It's a little bit of a thicker fish and it's not quite as tender. I'll give this a quick rinse at the sink and let it drip dry and then put it on the plate. You notice this is the thick part of the fish. This is the thinner part of the fish and the tail is actually very thin. So it's okay to actually tuck this tail in, especially if your plate is not that long and then it'll cook more evenly. Let's talk about equipment here. This is kind of a cool rack. The idea is you kind of lift it out like that. If you just use one of these, you could use this little gadget. It's a plate grabber. You know, you hold it up like that, but let's talk about walks for a minute. The best thing to use is actually a wok to steam it. This is a 16 inch wok, which is great for steaming. Usually you're going to have to have one of these slightly elevated rack. You'll put this in here and you cover it like that and that's a perfect steaming setup. I don't have a 16 inch wok, you say? You have your 14 inch wok. What happens if you don't have a rack, you say? Get the raddiest chopsticks that you have. They're sacrificial chopsticks. You put them just like this and voila, you have your steaming rack set up. No wok, you say? The big saute pan with cover. You put this in here. Oops. Use a round plate. No big deal. You say you have a big dinner party. You want it to be impressive. You got a big fish. It doesn't even fit in any of the woks or pans that you have. Well, I'm sure that you have one of these roasting pan. You could fit quite a large plate in here. Probably want to use your shallowest one. Fill it up with water. Get it boiling. Put the rack in. Put this one in and then cover it. You don't have a cover, you say? Heavy duty foil. Put it in nice and snug so that steam doesn't escape and then carefully lift it out. Get your water boiling and then put it in. Make sure you do that as a pre-step. You don't want to be fussing with a piece of heavy duty foil when the thing is super hot and steaming. There you go. So we're going to fill the wok. I'm probably going to put five or six cups of water in here. That should be plenty. Put the rack. You're going to boil the water first because you want to start with boiling water or it'll throw off your cooking times. This is our setup. We got a little saute pan here. We're going to put the oil. Infuse the ginger. Then the garlic and the black beans. You don't want to burn either of them. They'll turn bitter. A little bit of the scallion. Stir in the sauce. We're going to start this right when we put the fish in because this sauce can sit for a little while. The particles will settle nicely and when you pour it over the fish you're going to get a nice clean sauce. Presentation does matter. I hear our water steaming. I'm going to turn it down a little bit so that we get a good steam. We're going to steam this fillet first. It's going to be a little bit uneven because we got a thicker piece here and a thinner piece here and we'll just let that go and I'm going to start a timer for five minutes. Now we're going to actually start our sauce. I'm just going to put this on low. I'm going to put two tablespoons of oil in here. You know a lot of oil is nice because you're lubricating the fish and it makes it more luxurious. First thing we're going to do is put this ginger in. Increase the temperature a little bit. We're about halfway through the steaming of the fish. So now we got a nice sizzle. So I'm going to turn down the fire a little bit. I'm going to put this black bean in. Just around a bit. Garlic in next. I'm going to add some of these scallions. Probably the white parts of the scallions. Now that we've got this garlic toasted slightly, I'm going to pour the sauce in and bring this all up to a simmer. I'm going to turn this off right now and let this rest. Fish is less than a minute. Now a word on steaming fish. Steaming a branzino versus steaming a striped bass versus steaming let's say a trout. They're all different times. But then fillets are also different times. You get flounder fillets which are really super thin. Those will steam in like no time at all versus let's say a haddock which is thicker or a cod. They'll take a little bit longer time. But again, you don't want to over steam. We give you a guideline in the recipe for steaming times and their ranges. When you're steaming the fish, you're going to have to check it. Oh look at this fish. This is pretty cooked. You can see that everything is opaque and not translucent. I like to use a little butter knife. That looks like it's pretty cooked too. That was fast considering it's so thick. Fillets cook really fast. You notice all of this liquid here. All you do is use the spatula to hold the fish from sliding off and you just tilt it up. It's okay. It's okay. Okay. Now it's ready for the fresh scallions. Off we go. Here we are. It looks lovely. So this. Wow look at that. It's a little salty. I mean the difference of this versus a regular Cantonese fish is that the salted black beans are quite salty. I think it's good. The thick part of this fish is really nice. The thick part is really nice. The cod is very flaky. I thought it might have been overcooked but it's cooked perfectly. I think it could use a little bit more sugar. You like sweet stuff for some reason sometimes. I think it's perfect. You know, I don't like everything I cook. For credibility's sake, it's better to have a neutral party. And I think you're more than a neutral party. You're more critical. Yeah, I'm most critical. So I do like the flaky fish with the sauce. I think the two pairs really well. It could use a little bit more sugar. For your taste. For my preference. But these little black beans, I think the dish is much more attractive. If you had the ground black beans, this would be more of like a uniform sauce. Slightly more muddy. Yes, a lot more muddy. Now let's try the whole fish and let's see what the difference is. We're going to clean the branzini and I'm going to show you how to do it. All right, so usually the branzini comes in a little plastic bag. You keep this plastic bag and I'll tell you why. Looks like a nice fresh branzini. You can always tell with the eyes. And they have gutted it but they left all the stuff here and we're certainly not going to eat that. There's nothing pretty about this. You got to get your hands in there and dirty. They left some gills there and I don't really want that. The gills are usually attached here like this and you have to cut it at the top here. What they did is they just ripped out the gills. They have scaled it. You still see this stuff that's left in here and you see this membrane right here that has to come out. I just use my finger and sometimes I'll use a little butter knife and scrape it back. But when you scrape back this membrane, what happens is you get this bloodline here and this bloodline has to be cleaned out. First, I'm going to remove this paper. I'm going to run the water slightly and then I'm going to take my butter knife. I'm just going to score it a little bit so we can get to the bloodline. And you want to scrape all this excess clotted blood out. Basically detach it and then we'll rinse it out. It ain't pretty. Nope, it's not pretty. But you know, this is what happens when you're eating a fish and it's not filleted. You might be wondering why people would eat a whole fish rather than a fillet. Whole fish, the meat tastes much more tender, much more moist, especially for a delicate fish like a branzini. This is a really nice tail. I probably will leave that. There's these sharp fins at the top here. I'm going to cut these off. Any fisherman will tell you when you're handling a fish like this, you handle them usually from the belly unless they got a sharp fin on the belly here, which we're going to cut off also. There are still scales left and now that's a pet peeve of mine when I go out to eat. I don't want a mouthful of scales when I eat that. This collar piece here, this belly collar piece, probably one of the best pieces of fish. And if you're a fan of cheek meat, I know these cheeks on these branzinos are small, but there's something there. Usually if you have elders, they're going to want to eat the head. Judy's mom, she'll have a little meat too, but she wants the head. There you go. Nice looking branzino. Give it a final rinse, let it drain, and then we'll put it on the plate. All the stuff out of the strainer. I wrap it up nicely. I put it into this plastic bag and tie it right up and then it won't stink up the garbage. Okay, put the fish in, cover, turn it down slightly for seven minutes, whole fish. We'll make the sauce again. We'll add our two tablespoons of oil. In this case, we're using avocado oil. Get this nice flavor infusion here. The black beans in, toss that around. The garlic just pairs really well with the black beans. And I'll put a little bit of the whiter part of the scallions in. Oh boy, that smells good. Pour the sauce right in. Bring everything back to a simmer. Okay, turn off the flame, heat, and let it rest. We set it for the lower limits of seven minutes. Take this off. Okay, first sign is that the knife goes through very easily. All the way down to the bone and it looks done. When you peek at it, you're like, oh, look at that bone. It looks raw. You're not going to eat the bone. And when you take it out and you're prepping your sauce and you're pouring on it, it's going to continue to cook like anything else. There's nothing worse than having an overdone steamed fish. Cantonese taboo. Overcooked my fish! No good. So now, I'm going to take it over to the tasting plate. Ready to try this now. I'm going to put a little sauce in. Hey, the way to serve this fish, the way I usually do it, is I take the center, I cut it like this, and then this actually flakes off the bone pretty easily. Just like this. There you go. The fish is really soft. That's the difference between it. Between this fish and that fish. And the cod, right? Did you reduce the salt? Same. This is perfect. Could be because it's a whole fish? The skin protects the meat from absorbing extra sauce and stuff, so it kind of balances. But what's the old Chinese saying about eating fish? Oh, you should make the fish more salty. Just a tad saltier than your usual, because that brings out the flavor. In my opinion, this particular sauce, you can apply to a lot of fish. Like another fish that I think would do really well is the pomfret. Pomfret is good. It's not as delicate as the branzino, but it's firmer, but a different consistency than the cod, actually. I learned that you can't really overcook it. If you're like saying, oh, you know what? I'm not really precise. I'm not precise. That pomfret is a great fish. Freshwater largemouth bass, if you overcook it, it gets rubbery right away. Yeah. These are all saltwater fish. Saltwater fish are more forgiving when you cook them. Right. There is also... The sea bass, branzino, you can also use salmon. That's right. It's a different taste. Even croakers, actually, are very cheap fish, but when you steam them like this, croakers, huate, they are very delicate and really nice. Yeah. Another fish that I always wanted to try is the milkfish. A lot of Filipinos eat milkfish. They eat a lot of that. The other fish that we had with Andrew Zimmern, remember, was the gobi. That fish was like silken tofu. The carp would do really well with this. There's a lot of bones. But the more bones it has, the more delicate the meat is. That's true. If you can pick bones. I just want to show you here that the way you take this meat off is you sort of make a little slit at the top, lift this meat, and it'll just slide off. Get a spoon or something underneath this and then just lift. Cut this here. Take the whole bone off. Put it aside. And then this is the top bone. You can just slide this piece off. And then what I'll do is I'll take this relish back up. You cut it crosswise like this. And then this is a perfect serving of fish here. And you just keep going down the line here. And that's how it's done, folks. We've shown you a whole fish and a filet steamed in black bean sauce. And I'm sure you're going to enjoy it. So if you enjoyed this video, give it a like and visit us at thewalksoflife.com. And subscribe. And subscribe, Caitlin says.