These Fish Balls are Hong Kong’s #1 Street Food | Street Eats | Bon Appétit

So clean! Yummy. Welcome to Tuk Hing Yu Dan, Tuk Hing Fishball Company, where chef makes fresh fishballs every single day, which is hard to find in Hong Kong these days. And he's about to start the process, so let's see how he's doing it. Good morning, boss. Good morning! Fishballs, traditionally, are kind of a way to preserve the fish. Because fishball is an economic sort of food, it's always usually some type of fish that people are not gonna eat whole. These days, it's mostly yellow belly croaker. Nice and silvery and quite small. Like, it's no bigger than the span of your hand, really. This fish is caught very, very fresh. You can see by the cleanliness of the gills, the brightness of the eyes, how it's shiny and not slimy. Just because this fish doesn't sell for as much per piece doesn't mean that the quality and the freshness of the fish is not there. Good ingredients make good food. This is the first step. Chef really insists on making this fishball from scratch, largely by hand. What's important about doing it by hand isn't just for some moral superiority, it's about control of the product. Step two, baeyu. This machine is specifically made for the production of ground fish. This is a different type of fish. This is yellow pike conger. It's a saltwater fish. Chef is lying it flat on this rotating, perforated surface. A hydraulic press presses the fish through those holes so that on the bottom, you get clean fish meat. And if you come around on the other side, as it exits the press, this arm is then pressing and smoothing out the fish onto this little cutter here so that as it's being raised, it comes out with a little bit of those pin bones still attached to the skin of the eel, but all of the flesh extracted for fishball production. This becomes the second bestseller here, which is fried fish skin with bones. What people see as waste is texture, it's flavor. I remember vividly the first time I had fish skin with bones in it. Changed my life. I've eaten fried fish skin my whole life as a Hong Konger, but the first time with bones on it, it just becomes a whole different thing. So these types of fish, they come from Southeast Asia where it's a little bit warmer. These are not fished in the harbors of Hong Kong. Dude, so fast. So fast. So clean. That's so cool. First cut, filling the fish to expose the spine. Second cut, he's removing that spine, but keeping the bones that come off of it attached. He's keeping all of those bones that come off the spine because he wants to get that crispy skin later. Dude, look, just, what the heck? So clean. So fast. This is a huge fish. Cool. So cool. The rest of this is gonna get portioned out and then straight to the machine. The two fishes do different things. Chef says the eel gives it a little bit more smoothness and body. That's because of the fat percentage being higher in eel than in the croaker, where the croaker is gonna give you that fresh fish flavor. Croaker is also going to provide that gelatinous texture. You can really see the buoyancy of this fish as compared to the eel, whereas the other fish provides more of that smoothness. After the fish comes out of the grinder, it's minced into a finer grind size, and then it goes inside of the mixer with the bag of ice so that it finally becomes that fine, smooth fish ball texture. Ice reduces the temperature. In Hong Kong, when it's really, really hot, you don't want your fish to get too hot because it'll go bad. But more importantly, what that ice does is prevents the fish from being cooked. As it's being beaten, the friction that's being created by that paddle, by that mixing, will heat up the fish. Fish is so delicate that it will cook at like 40 degrees Celsius. Imagine when you're making a custard with eggs and you don't temper the eggs properly, and it breaks apart and it scrambles. Even if you were to re-emulsify it, even if you were to like blend it more to get it smooth and you could add things to it so that it's settled, it still has a little bit of that grittiness. You wanna prevent that grittiness. Oh, it's quite fast. That water from that ice melting is gonna provide a little bit of smoothness and texture. The fish is being pressed up against each other to start building that myosin, a very specific type of protein that maintains the moisture inside of beaten meat products. Really smooth meatballs or fish balls or sausages have that kind of bounce and snap because of this extraction of this myosin. It also protects and holds the protein with the fat so that everything's about layering air in between so that it can bounce. That's springiness. That's where the texture comes from. That's the smoothness, and that's the retention of moisture as it's being cooked. Today, they're processing about 265 pounds of fish, all of which has gone into here. The fish itself, because it's a saltwater fish, it has salinity, it has saltiness, but to accentuate it and give yourself a little bit of a larger margin of error, a little bit of white pepper to get rid of any traces of gaminess, as well as a little bit of potato starch. For 260 pounds-ish, you put in maybe two cups, two and a half cups. It's a tiny amount of starch. After a couple of minutes of beating, you can see the air and you can see the lightness, the bounciness, and the springiness being developed. This gets beaten for 30 minutes. This is where you screw it up. I've made fish balls before for all sorts of events and restaurants, and it's hard to do. Super nice and smooth. You get a little bit of that gloss. It's cohesive. It's one mass. It goes into the machine. Oh, I see. Okay, the fish is getting piped, basically, into these little consistent balls. This is warm water. You have to get rid of some of that cold iciness, and the warm water helps set the fish ball just a little bit. It's not cooking it, but it's starting the protein denaturing process. I mean, it's so satisfying. This is like internet-level comfort brain stuff. I guess it's a little bit like a poach. You're maintaining it at a relatively low but still warm temperature so that that fish ball can set in shape. There must be thousands and thousands every day. So nice, so consistent. There are two primary types of fish balls in Hong Kong. The first are fried, piped individually. They get set in warm water, and then they get deep fried so that that frying seals in the fish ball. Different textural experience. Second type of fish ball in Hong Kong are the unfried types, and they're usually purchased in a tray like this, where the fish, after it's being beaten, gets squeezed through chef's hands and with a soup spoon, remarkably consistent, laying them out a little bit like a honeycomb, one by one. That fish ball, it'll get set in warm water and then sold to markets as one large piece. I've eaten this my whole life. Seeing it made in action, you really forget that there's a human being behind this, not just a machine. This is the fish skin. It's a huge wok of oil. It looks like they're frying pretty hot, maybe 375 Fahrenheit. It's a dry batter. There's no wet ingredients added. This is a standard-issue fish skin that you'll get at fish ball shops, noodle shops all over Hong Kong. The bone-in kind, that's much, much harder to find. Usually, only places that make their own fish balls will have them. After the skin comes out of the fryer and is drained off, chef puts it in front of a fan just to cool down. Despite how alluring it is when it first comes out of the fryer, it's only crispy after it's fully cool. And once it's cool, boss is gonna put it into bags to sell to customers. And they're primarily producing fish balls and fish cakes for people to buy, to take home. But if you wanted to eat it here, you can get it in the storefront. They make it as a little snack, classic Hong Kong street-style fish balls with your choice of sauce. So the fish skin, the bone-in ones, the fried fish balls, this is the primary snack. This is pian tou, so fish cake cut into little triangles, and then yu pian, which is the whole cake. And it's all the same batter, different shapes, but different shapes mean different surface areas, different surface areas mean different textures. It's time, I'm hungry. Let's get some fish balls. I'll have a fish ball, please, ma'am. What do people usually eat? Do you want curry? Yes, curry. If you don't eat curry, then soy sauce, right? Curry fish balls, tiny little cup, just a snack. Best way to eat this at home is in a noodle with broth, which you can buy here, or like hot pot or something, but this is the way that Hong Kong people like to have it as a snack. Yummy. The sauce, standard issue, kind of like mild Hong Kong-style curry, a little bit of coconut flavor, but the fish ball itself is the main highlight. I would eat this even without the sauce. So I'm gonna get another one. This is actually just a fish ball. Minimal seasoning. Earlier, Chef said the perfect fish ball is three things. Song, wak, yau yu mei. Song, just springy. Wak means smooth. Yau yu mei has plenty of fresh fish flavor. And when you eat it without any sauce on it, you can feel the waves of that fish flavor coming through. The only seasoning for a little bit of like piquancy, a little bit of spice, is the white pepper. And the bounce on that fish ball is outstanding. When you bite into it, so consistent, uniform, nice and smooth. Fish balls are kind of commodities in Hong Kong, and us Hong Kong people take it for granted. But when it's really special is when it's made by detail-oriented craftsmanship. Oy. Yum. So good. I could eat these all day. I really want to try those bone-in fish skins. This bag goes for 40 HKD, which is about five US dollars. That's kind of expensive, dude. The fish ball's also 10 Hong Kong dollars for three. That's kind of expensive. But what you're paying for is the craftsmanship. More important, you're paying for fresh fish. Look at this. Just gorgeous, artistic curl. And see that texture? So this is the skin of the conger eel, the back half of it. You see all of that spine, those are the thicker ones here. The really thin ones in between will be the pin bones. This is gonna be a thicker crunch on top of the crisp of the skin side. Still warm. So good. This is the best thing here. You don't get this type of perfectly imperfect texture all the time. So that was dak heng yu dan. One way to eat this food is out of nostalgia. A better way to eat this food is out of just respect for the craft. This is what I like about Hong Kong. Even the simplest things, when you go to the right place, you can really see what it's really supposed to be, what a proper fish ball is like. It's quintessential Hong Kong.