Tim Chin is a professional cook and writer who has contributed to Serious Eats and America’s Test Kitchen. A graduate of The International Culinary Center, Tim has cooked at restaurants in New York and Boston, working at Rouge Tomate, Northern Spy, and BiSq.

Tim Chin

If there’s one dish that captures the spirit and finesse of Cantonese cooking, it’s whole steamed sizzling fish: a whole fish steamed with aromatics, topped with julienned green onion, anointed with smoking hot oil, then doused in a slightly sweetened soy sauce. It’s a simple but dramatic preparation, but it’s tricky to get just right. The sauce is minimalist, ditto the aromatics, so there’s not a lot to mask the quality of the fish or how it’s been prepared. The key (after <a href="https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/selecting-fish-for-purchase">selecting the right fish</a>) is all in the steaming technique: cooking the fish so its flesh is perfectly tender and silky, not chalky and overdone. In many classic Chinese seafood restaurants (the ones with the galleries of fish tanks in the windows), the fish is typically cooked in giant steam ovens, which give cooks two options: fast, vigorous steam and low, gentle steam. Typically, home cooks only use the latter option in their steaming setups, letting the water simmer or boil for the duration of the cook. But if you dial in the precise temperature of the pan—and thus the water inside the steaming setup—you can regulate both the temperature and the amount of water vapor that will cook your fish, creating a far more gentle cooking environment than a steamer with billowing heads of steam. The internal temperature of the fish will consequently rise more slowly, giving you ample time to monitor its progress with a probe thermometer and reducing the risk of overcooking significantly.

Precision Cantonese-Style Sizzling Steamed Fish