Mom’s steamed fish with ginger, garlic & tauchu [Recipe]

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[This recipe is one of our NINE Favourite Recipes of 2020. Check out the post here].

The gravy might look tame, but it packs a punch in terms of flavour! Expect a strong ginger-garlic taste with some heat from the cili padi, tauchu to provide a hint of savouriness, and Shaoxing wine to balance it out. 

This is one of our favourite dishes from Max’s mom! When we asked her for the recipe – she told me to agak-agak (guesstimate).

Therefore, we also agak-agak when we cooked this recipe from memory. It turned out tasting quite similar to her dish – so we’re quite happy!

Thankfully for both yours (and our) sake, we’ve decided to commit the recipe to paper.

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When researching, we couldn’t find many recipes similar to our mom’s. The closest dish is steamed fish with tauchu (fermented yellow beans) – but we find our mom’s recipe features the ginger more prominently with the tauchu as a sidekick. It’ super addictive!

KEY TIPS:
* Our recipe is for a 750g fish – please adjust sauce accordingly to your fish size. 
* Our mom’s go-to-fish is tilapia, We used siakap which we bought from Fish For It! As always, it was fresh and perfect for steamed dishes like this.
* For maximum taste, we used 1/3 of the uncooked paste to marinade the slits and inside the fish cavity.
* To check if fish is cooked, use a chopstick to poke at the thickest part of the flesh. If it separates from the bone easily and the flesh is not translucent  – it is ready. If not, let it cook for another 2-3 minutes (be careful, you do not want to overcook it).
* Garnish the top of the fish with some cut chilli before serving, if you like.

For step-by-step process and videos, check out our Instagram post here.

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