Should You Add Salt When Marinating Fish? How Do You Do It?
My family loves to eat fish, and we've eaten fish since childhood. We mostly cook fish with methods like boiling, stewing, braising, and frying, and these methods usually require preliminary processing and marinating. Marinating typically uses a lot of salt, along with ingredients like scallions and ginger. Here's a local saying: 'Salty Fish, Light Meat.' This refers to the fact that fish dishes should be saltier than other dishes, and meat dishes should be a bit lighter, to enhance the flavor. This is just a local custom, and it doesn't suit everyone's taste.
Should we add salt when marinating fish blocks?
Answer: Marinating fish must add salt
Why?
We usually marinate fish before frying it, which helps prevent it from breaking when frying. The specific method of fish varies, and cannot be treated uniformly. Let me share some methods that can be used for marinating fish below.
Fish can be cooked in many ways, such as stir-frying, pan-frying, roasting, deep-frying, steaming, etc. Generally, these methods require preliminary processing of the fish, which is marinating. Different regions have different methods, and different cooking methods require different processing of the fish.
Why do we add salt when marinating fish?
1. Salt can remove excess moisture from the fish blocks; 2. Salt can remove the fishy smell by marinating, reducing the fishy smell; 3. Salt can tighten the fish meat, which prevents it from breaking when frying, stewing, or boiling. It's easy to form pieces and looks appetizing. Pieces of fish are fried to a golden brown and fragrant.
Which cooking methods require marinating fish?
Stir-frying, pan-frying, roasting, deep-frying, stewing, boiling, and braising all generally require marinating fish blocks, especially those cut into fish blocks. We usually use marinated seasonings; they are salt,(liao jiu -), scallions, and ginger. If we want the fish flavor to be rich and without fishy smell, we can add special ingredients such as lemon, soy sauce, barbecue sauce, cumin powder, chili powder, etc. as marinated seasonings.
How much salt should be added when marinating fish?
For home-cooked fish dishes like boiling, frying, and braising, we usually use methods like boiling, frying, and braising. These cooking methods require a preliminary step of cutting the fish or cooking it whole. Usually, the ratio of fish to salt is approximately 10:1, about one pound of fish with one pound of salt. However, we cannot use less than this amount, otherwise the effect will be minimal. Marinating fish with too little salt will cause it to lose moisture and become fragile when frying. Some places, however, emphasize 'salty fish, light meat,' and suggest adding more salt to the fish.
How long should fish be marinated?
We generally don't marinate fish for too long, as it will lose too much moisture, making the fish taste bad. The typical marinating time is about 10-20 minutes. This also ensures that the marinated ingredients are well-absorbed. The specific marinating time depends on the type of fish and the cooking method.
Which cooking methods don't need to marinate fish?
Steaming is a method of cooking fish where the focus is on the freshness and tenderness of the fish meat. Since salt can quickly dehydrate fish cells, the fish meat will become dry and tough, making it unpalatable and damaging the nutritional value of the fish. Therefore, it is not recommended to use salt to marinate fish when steaming. Instead, we can clean the fish and insert scallions and ginger into its belly before steaming.
Coco's Little Tips
1. Different fish require different marinating methods and seasonings, and the marinating time is also different; 2. Different cooking methods have marinating and non-marinating aspects, which should be treated differently; 3. Stewing, boiling, frying, and braising cooking methods can add more salt and marinate for a while, because these cooking methods make the fish fragile.
Coco's Delicious Food, the most important thing is for family members to have three meals a day, and her biggest hobby is to create all kinds of delicious food. Recipes are just to share the process of making delicious food herself, not the only standard. There are many 'homes' in cuisine, and each person has a different preference. Please be patient with me, and please like, collect, and forward my post. Your forwarding is the biggest encouragement to Coco!
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