A Chinese home cooking classic. Pan fried black cod (also known as sablefish) with an all-purpose stir fry sauce. Rice absolutely required.

Time: 2/5
Not much prep or hassle, although this won’t scale well for meal prep.

Effort: 3/5
A bit more dishes to do than usual, although in my opinion it’s well worth the effort

Nostalgic Dinner

Here’s a staple technique for cooking any type of fish, from the arsenal of the battle hardened Cantonese mom. It’s called 煎封 (jeen-foong), which means “to pan fry then toss in a viscous sauce”.

Ever since making an effort to include more fish in my diet for the health benefits, I have been looking for techniques to keep fish interesting. After a long journey seeking novelty in the other cuisines of the world, perhaps it is time to return to my roots.

As is sometimes the case, the star of the show isn’t the protein. In this recipe, the true hero is the delicious sauce made with the fond and the drippings left from pan searing the fish. Sweet, savoury and glistening with a glossy finish, the sauce is perfect for spooning over some steamed white rice!

The base sauce is the same one I use for a lot of my stir fries: pork and peppers, beef and leeks, or duck and shiitake lettuce cups. But the magic comes when the sauce absorbs the flavour of whatever you cook it in, creating all sorts of unique combinations with the same base.

I highly recommend you experience this sauce evolution yourself. Use one of the recipes to learn how to put together the sauce base, line up different ingredients to cook it with, and get to stir frying!

Posts since the last recipe that was actually served with rice: 0

Dramatis Personae

• 2x 200g black cod steaks
• 2 tablespoons corn starch
• 1 teaspoon white pepper

The corn starch helps get a nice crust on the fish, and also helps thicken the sauce later down the line. It’s the same idea as using flour, although I’ve never tried the substitution.

You could salt the fish directly if you like, but I am going to cook it with the sauce which has plenty of sodium, so I think I’m good here.

Aromatics:

• A few slices of ginger
• One bunch of scallions

The aroma of well-charred ginger and scallions are non-negotiable. Some families also use garlic, but mine doesn’t. I don’t bother peeling my ginger if I’m not going to eat the pieces, but you can decide for yourself on that.

For the sauce:

• 1 tbsp oyster sauce
• 1 tbsp light soy sauce 
• 4 tsp sugar
• 1 tsp Shaoxing wine
• Water to taste

4 teaspoons might seem like an alarming amount of sugar, and you should feel free to use less to begin with. But in my opinion, half of the magic of this sauce is to balance out the intense savouriness of the oyster sauce and soy sauce with some equally intense sweetness.

The other half of the magic is a tiny bit of Shaoxing wine. Definitely try to get it if you don’t already, because it goes a long way towards making your home cooking taste like the real deal at the restaurant.

Vegetables:

Always eat your veggies! I’m serving the fish with this 5-ingredient Napa Cabbage Soup, but with the addition of some enoki mushrooms. The soup pulls double duty as a source of fiber, as well as some much needed warmth on a cold winter day.

Executive summary

1. Make rice. Dust the fish with corn starch and white pepper. Prepare the aromatics and sauce ingredients.
2. Stir fry ginger in some oil in a skillet until fragrant.
3. Sear the fish on both sides until lightly browned.
4. Add sugar, soy sauce and oyster sauce to the pan, allowing the sugar to caramelise a bit.
5. Deglaze the pan with some water. Turn the fish around to coat in the sauce.
6. Top the fish with scallions, then cover the skillet and simmer for about 10 minutes.
7. Once the fish flakes and sauce is reduced to your liking, it is ready. Serve hot.

Play by Play

I’m beginning with the soup because I can just leave that alone on the back burner once I set everything up.

Dried shrimp and ginger goes into cold water while the pot comes up to a boil, so it can start infusing the water with flavour. The vegetables get cut and washed, then unceremoniously stuffed into the pot. Don’t worry if it seems like it won’t fit, the vegetables will release water and cook down.

Moving on. I reserved some ginger from the vegetable soup and started getting some colour on them in the pan. In the meantime, the halibut gets dusted with corn starch and white pepper before joining the ginger.

Hey look, the vegetables are ready! I’ll keep the lid on and let the pot hang out. The residual heat will keep the veggies warm.

Now that the fish has gotten some colour, I added the soy sauce and the oyster sauce. The sugar also goes in, to cook it into a sort of caramel. This is a similar technique to making Taiwanese Three-Cup Chicken!

Add water and scallions, then cover to steam. You can simmer uncovered for a while towards the end to reduce the sauce further. Halibut is a fatty fish so I’m not too worried about overcooking it, but if you use something lean like cod I would play this carefully.

There we go! Nothing left to do but to plate up and serve. I love how glossy the sauce with, you only get this effect with a decent amount of caramel. Don’t skimp on the sugar.

Super juicy, super aromatic, super savoury. Rice mandatory for soaking up the sauce.

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