Sichuan Water-Cooked Fish in Oil, Dried Chilli and Peppercorn 四川水煮鱼

Winter is coming, it's perfect to eat hot and spicy dish. Here is one of the dish that you can cook - Sichuan representative dish: Sichuan water-cooked fish, or shuizhuyu, which mainly use dried chilli and peppercorn for hot, spicy and tingly numbing flavours.

Ingredients:

1. Fish, fillet yourself. Leave the fish head/tail/bones aside

2. Sichuan Peppercorn

3. Dried chillies

4. Garlic paste, Ginger paste (or chopped finely)

5. Pepper, salt, flour, cooking wine, egg 

6. Bean chilli paste (I used Korean brand bean chilli paste) 

7. Almost cooked Bean sprout (70-80% cooked, you can boil the water to cook it or use microwave oven). Since the dish is hot, this is served as cooling effect. So do prepare enough.

 

Instructions:

1. Marinated fish fillets with pepper, salt, egg, flour and cooking wine.

2. Heat the wok with oil, put in dried chilli, pepper corn and bean chilli paste. Fried it until you smell the spicy fragrance. Add in garlic and ginger. Fried them together.

3.  Then add in water (this will be soup base, add enough to cover all the fish fillets later). Also add in salt, cooking wine, pepper, some sugar, light soya sauce, fish head/tail and fish bones. Cook and simmering it until the soup base is ready.

4. When the soup is ready, add in the fish fillet and cover the wok. The fish will be cooked in 1 minutes or less. Turn off the heat. 

5. Now, switch to use another pan. Heat the pan with oil (3-4 times more than you usually used for vegetables cooking), add in dried chilli, peppercorn. Fried until it's fragance, add in ginger and garlic. Fried them until you can smell the spicy fragance.

6. Prepare a big bowl (which the dish will be served with), put the bean sprout at the bottom of the big bowl, pour in the fish fillet and the soup. Then pour in the Oil from Step 5. And then, serve it hot!

Tasting:

It's a success! It's kind of sweet, spicy and numbing. Indeed it's very appetizing. The fish fillets are prefect because the fish meat is kept juicy with great flavours. But beware, you need to prepare a packet of tissues just in case you need this for the "juice" coming out from your nose.

Reference:

1. 水煮鱼的做法

2. 水煮鱼的简单做法2种