How to make red yeast fish

China is a vast country, and each region has different tastes when it comes to food. Take the cooking of fish as an example, each region has different cooking methods. Red yeast rice is a special method of cooking fish in Hunan Province. The successfully prepared red yeast rice is bright in color, looks mouth-watering, and is also a very good side dish to go with rice. However, if you want to make red yeast rice at home, you should learn this method.

Changsha Red Yeast Fish (Zhayu) (Xiangjiang Red Yeast Fish) Recipe

1. First, clean the fish (green, grass, carp, bream are all fine) and apply salt on it.

2. Hang the fish coated with salt in the wind for three or four days. When the surface moisture of the fish has dried, cut the fish into pieces or pieces.

3. Mix the red yeast rice and white wine, and put the fish pieces into the liquid.

4. Put the fish pieces with liquid (red yeast) into a clean (water-free) clay pot for soaking.

5. Seal the jar and take it out when you want to eat it after half a year.

allusion:

The entry "Huguang Pickling Method" in "Zunsheng Bajian" written by Gao Lian in the Ming Dynasty was the first to introduce the practice of Hunanese people adding red yeast rice when pickling fish. During the Ming and Qing dynasties, Hunan and Hubei were under the jurisdiction of the same province, "Huguang". Gao lived during the Wanli period (1573-1619) of the Ming Dynasty. The fact that he specifically used the region as the topic shows that only the two lakes had this pickling method at that time. However, before the end of the Qing Dynasty, the use of red yeast rice to make pickled fish was only seen in western Hunan, and was mainly among the Miao and Tujia ethnic groups. The "Yongding Local Chronicles" of the Guangxu period of the Qing Dynasty (1875-1908) recorded the pickled fish in the Zhangjiajie area today: "Every winter, it is purchased from the lower reaches of the Lishui River to make pickled fish, pickled with salt and alum, and added with red yeast rice... It is called red fish." The reason for this is related to the war. Take the Zhang Xianzhong Rebellion in the late Ming Dynasty as an example. According to Ji Liuqi's "Ming Dynasty Southern Records", in the spring of 1644, Zhang led his troops into Hunan to plunder and kill, "and then captured all the boats and residents in Hunan, and rowed boats from Yiling (Yuanjiang River) into Sichuan." As a result, the lakeside area was deserted, and the captives "ran out of food on the boat, and most of them died of starvation." Soon after, the Qing army entered Hunan and carried out a massacre, and the skill of making pickled fish was lost. This skill was able to be preserved in western Hunan because the terrain there is rugged and it was spared from the calamity of war. By the beginning of the 20th century, fishing areas such as Changde Lakeside and Yuanjiang River imitated the production and sold it to Changsha, Xiangtan, Wuhan and other places, and this pickling method began to spread.