This dish is a family favourite of ours, as my grandad was a master at it. It’s normally cooked on special nights. Every cook has a signature dish that people keep coming back for, and this is his one.
It’s a Cantonese dish, and every household will add their own flavour to it. Ours was always finished with Shaoxing cooking wine. The balance of the ginger and spring onions and the texture of the chunks of white fish, lightly coated in batter, soaking up all that flavour from the sauce, is just amazing.
It is also a traditional Chinese wedding banquet dish, but instead of fish it’s cooked traditionally with lobster.
Kwanghi Chan is chef-proprietor at Bowls by Kwanghi Chan in Dublin 1 and creator of the Chan Chan product line.
Lightly battered cod fillets in spring onion and ginger sauce with jasmine rice
Serves two
Ingredients
400g cod fillets
1 tbsp garlic, minced
5 slices of ginger, soaked in 1 tbsp of shaoxing wine
2 bunches of spring onion, cut into 1-inch pieces
Cooking oil
For the fish marinade
2 tbsp Shaoxing wine
1 tbsp sugar
1 tsp salt
1 egg white lightly whisked with a fork
4 tsp potato starch or cornflour
½ tsp white pepper
For the seasoning
2 tbsp oyster sauce
¾ tbsp light soya sauce
2 tsp sugar
Dash of pepper
200ml water
Potato starch thickening: 2 tsp potato starch or cornflour, mixed with 2 tbsp water
Method
1 Mix everything in the fish marinade together. Add the fish fillets and set aside in the fridge for at least 30 minutes.
2 Heat some cooking oil till hot and blanch the marinated fish in the oil for approximately one minute.
3 Drain the fish well and place them on paper towels to soak up the excess oil.
4 Reserving one tablespoon of cooking oil in the wok, add the minced garlic, white parts of spring onion and the sliced ginger. Stir fried briefly till aromatic.
5 Add all the seasoning ingredients and allow it to simmer on low heat till it boils. Add in the potato starch thickening mixture.
6 Once the sauce starts to thicken, add the fish slices. Gently stir to mix well in a folding motion; do not break the fish fillets.
7 Add the green parts of the spring onion and the shaoxing wine that was used to soak the ginger. Stir briefly to mix.
8 Serve immediately with steamed rice.
Kitchen Cabinet is a series of recipes from chefs who are members of Euro-Toques Ireland, who have come together during the coronavirus outbreak to share some of the easy, tasty things that they like to cook and eat at home #ChefsAtHome
