Unlike the Szechuanese dish, the Cantonese version does the name justice. Use salted fish to create a fragrant and deeply savoury sauce, and use as much or as little meat as you like.

Time: 3/5
Like most stir fries, this one doesn’t take long.

Effort: 4/5
Put in the love and you’ll taste the difference.

Fish is Flavour

Jump to Recipe

• Ingredients
• Instructions
• Step by step pictures

You may have heard of the Szechuan dish Fish Fragrant Eggplant (魚香茄子, or yuxiang qiezi), an eggplant stir fry with a sauce based on doubanjang and vinegar and misleadingly no fish at all. But you may not know that there’s a Cantonese version of this recipe that does indeed contain fish!

More specifically, fourfinger threadfin (馬友, or Ma-yau). Just like anchovies in Italian cooking, the salted fish melts in the sauce to give the sauce a deep, savoury umami alongside the usual suspects like oyster sauce, soy sauce and Shaoxing wine. The better quality ones are preserved in oil, so look for those when you’re at the store. 

This recipe is a solid addition to my Carnivore Rehab series. Because the threadfin gives the dish so much flavour, you don’t need a lot of meat in the stir fry. Just a bit of ground pork is sufficient to give it some extra depth, and you are at liberty to adjust the ratio of pork to eggplant as you desire. 

You can even substitute some pork with quark or tofu crumble, if that’s what you’re into. This recipe would probably work with as little as 100-200g of pork over 7 portions. That’s something I am considering the next time I make this, but for now I like to use a substantial amount of pork as a protein source.

Besides, this recipe calls for the eggplant to be briefly fried in oil to retain their colour and improve their texture. This preparatory fry, along with the fragrant and meaty sauce, makes it a lot easier for someone to learn to like eating vegetables.

But like most stir fries, it’s hard to scale up without either compromising on quality, or cooking in batches and taking more time. Even so, the prospect of having a lot of savoury, saucy, meaty eggplants to consume throughout the week is enough to motivate me to put in the work.

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

Dramatis Personae

Served 7.

• 1200g ground pork
• 3 eggplants

Aromatics

• 1 piece of salted fourfinger threadfin fish, deboned and minced
• A few cloves of garlic, crushed and peeled
• A few slices of ginger 
• A few shallots, peeled and halved

For the sauce 

• 4 tbsp Shaoxing wine
• 4 tbsp light soy sauce
• 2 tbsp dark sauce
• 1 tbsp oyster sauce
• 1 tbsp sugar

Served with a choisum and carrot stir fry. Always eat your veggies!

Executive summary

1. Prepare the aromatics and the salted fish, and set aside. Wash and eggplant into large chunks.
2. Heat about 1cm of oil in a pan until it bubbles around a pair of wooden chopsticks. 
3. Briefly fry the eggplant in batches, until lightly browned, and reserve.
4. Blot off excess oil with paper towels. Stir fry ground pork in batches until lightly ground, and reserve.
5. Stir fry aromatics until fragrant. Add sauce ingredients, pork, and eggplant back into the pan. Stir to combine and simmer briefly.
6. Taste and adjust seasoning. If desired, thicken the sauce with a cornstarch slurry and serve hot.

Play by Play

The salted threadfin comes with bones, but you can deal with that by peeling the flesh off of the big central vertebra. Try your best to get the small pin bones out, but if you have a nice sharp knife it doesn’t matter if you mince the bones with the flesh really fine.

Stir fries move fast, so make sure you have everything prepped before you start. Th eggplant shrink to about half their size once cooked, so keep that in mind when cutting your chunks.

I begin with the eggplant – as much oil as you dare, get it nice and hot, add eggplant and stir vigorously. You can skip this pre-fry if you want to save on calories, but it preserves the eggplant’s colour and texture.

Next is the pork, aromatics, and sauce. Like Italian anchovies, the salted threadfin melts right into the sauce. Do note that the pork doesn’t need to be cooked all the way through, it just needs to pick up some colour.

Once the sauce is formed, I add everything back to the pot and give it a good mix. Let it simmer for a few minutes to let the flavours meld, but not so long that the eggplants turn into mush.

And that’s all there is to it! Plate up and serve.

Nice and saucy, the eggplant still has a nice bite, and all you need is a spoon.

Keep browsing by categories, or by tags: