[Chinese Recipes] Szechuan Fish – Suan Cai Y

Szechuan style fish stew with pickled mustard greens. This is not a famous dish but I feel something like it is my responsibility to introduce this dish to Szechuan style food lovers.

This dish belongs to the classic Shui Zhu dishes. As a sister dish to Szechuan style water boiled spicy fish, it is available in almost every Sichuan style restaurant inside China. I searched a lot concerning about this dish for finding some basic options about this dish but ended my search with nothing. Then I guess one main problem might be the pickled mustard green, which is the most important ingredient in this fish stew.

Firstly in case you are new reader to this blog, I would introduce the background. There are many pickled vegetables in Sichuan cuisine. We have pickled chili peppers named as “ pao jiao” and other pickled vegetables like pickled cucumber, pickled cabbage and this pickled mustard green as “ suan cai”. In order to make this yummy suan cai yu at home, you need to go out searching for some packaged suan cai or find some fresh Chinese mustard green and pickle them at home according to this recipe: pickled mustard green. It is not so time consuming and healthier.

Another cooking tip for this fish stew is to make the fish slices. I have showed the process in the previous Szechuan water boiled fish video. We use grass carp usually. But this type is not available; you can replace it with other white meat fish.

Here we are! Enjoy!

Szechuan Fish-Suan Cai Yu

Prep Time: 15 mins
Cook Time: 20 mins
Total Time: 35 mins

Another yummy Szechuan style fish stew--Suan Cai Yu
Course: Main Course
Cuisine: Sichuan cuisine
Keyword: fish, suan cai
Servings: 4
Calories: 307 kcal
Author: Elaine

Ingredients

• 1 fresh fish around 800g to 1000g
• 1 cup pickled mustard green
• 4 fresh shitake mushrooms
• 10 dried pepper flakes or more as needed
• 5 green onions or 1 scallion , separate the white part and green part 10 garlic cloves, peeled and sliced
• 1 inch root ginger
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 10 whole Sichuan peppercorn seeds 3 tablespoons cooking oil
• 4 tablespoons starch
• 1 teaspoon white pepper powder
• 2 L water or as needed

Instructions

1. Wash the fish carefully and separate the bones and fish fillet. Then slice the fillet into really thin slices and cut the bones into large sections.
2. In a large bowl with clean water, soak and wash the fish slices until they become almost transparent. Transfer out and drain.
3. Marinade the fish bones and fish fillet slices with salt, cornstarch and white pepper powder. Set aside.
4. Heat up around 1 tablespoon cooking oil in a large wok, fry garlic, ginger, green onions and whole Sichuan peppercorn for around 1 to 2 minutes or until aroma. Add pickled mustard green for another minute. Pour around 2L of fresh cold water and mushrooms, simmer the soup for around 20 minutes. Taste the soup and add salt accordingly.
5. Pick the bones out and cook the in the soup prepared I previous step for around 5 minutes. Transfer all the content expects the soup to your serving bowl.
6. Turn up the fire and add fish slices to cook for around 1 minute. Transfer all the content out to serving bowl too.
7. Prepare another pan, heat up 2 tablespoons of oil with dried chili peppers until really hot. Pour the oil to the serving bowl evenly on the surface.
8. Garnish some chopped green onion and serve hot!

This recipe and image sources are referred in website: Chinasichuanfood.com. Thanks so much!