Boiled Fish Filets

Boiled Fish Filets is what I call a famous Chinese cuisine. I have spent much effort on searching its formal English name but it seems people got different ideas on that. So I use this short clear name that I think can best describe the food.

Boiled Fish Filets is mainly a pot of fish filets in hot chili oil originated from Sichuan. I have been crazy about this cuisine since a long time ago. I made several sttempts to cook the fish but never succeeded. I didn't know how restaurants made the fish filets so tender and made the oil soup so clear. What I cooked was a bowl of tough fish meat in turbid soup. After many failures I gave up trying.

Recently, I have seen a post talking about how to cook Boiled Fish Filets and the pictures are really tempting. The whole procedures are almost the same as mine. The only difference is I lacked a step of boiling in oil before boiling in soup. Inspired by the post, I tried again.

Here are my new procedures:

Cut 350 grams of fish into big filets;

Add half egg white and two spoons of corn flour and stir to mix well with the fish (the mixture should cover the surface of fish filets. If the egg white is too much, big protein bubbles would be produced when boiling in oil);

Stir-fry 500 grams of bean sprouts with a little salt (time should be controlled to make sure the bean sprouts are half raw);

Then the most important step is pouring oil that is enough to cover all fish filets into a pot and boiling until it fumes, after that put the fish filets in the pot;

Fish out the fish filets from oil and transfer to the bean sprouts bowl;

Scatter a large amount of peppers and other spicy seasonings on the fish;

Pour a pot of boiling water to the fish bowl and add some beef soup bases (the soup should be very salty because there isn't any salt in the fish).

After that it's well done. The feature of this cuisine is spicy. If you cannot eat too spicy, one way is to prepare a bowl of clear water and clean the spicy fish in the water before eating.