Duojiao Yutou (Steamed Fish Head with Chopped Chili)

Name: Duojiao Yutou (Steamed Fish Head with Chopped Chili)
Total time: 35 min
Yield: 4
Cuisine: Hunanese
Ingredients: 1 large (about 1 kg) Bighead carp or silver carp head; 150 g Duo jiao (Hunan chopped fermented chili); 30 g Ginger, half sliced and half minced; 6 cloves Garlic, minced; 4 Scallion; 30 ml (2 tbsp) Shaoxing wine; 20 ml Light soy sauce; 6 g (1½ tsp) Sugar; just a pinch Salt; 50 ml Neutral oil; 150 g Fresh rice noodles or thin wheat noodles

A split fish head buried under scarlet fermented chili and steamed hard for twelve minutes — Hunan's loudest dish, salty and sour and fierce, eaten straight off the platter with noodles at the end.

Sumber

Resipi oleh Hunan home kitchens · 🏠 Masakan rumah · A signature of the Hunan table, most famously from Xiangtan — no single author

Hunan cuisine / 湘菜 — Duojiao yutou is a signature of Hunan cuisine: a large fish head — usually bighead or silver carp — steamed under a thick blanket of duo jiao, the province's salted-and-fermented chopped chili, which is the key flavouring the dish is built on. It is salty, sharply sour and fiercely hot, with the tender flesh set against the fermented heat, and the version made in Xiangtan is the most famous. Chili peppers reached Hunan by the 17th century, first appearing in local gazetteers not long after.

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China Recipes China Food Recipe

⏱ 35 min🍽 4 hidangan🔥 280 kcal🇨🇳 China🌶️🌶️🌶️

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Ask the fishmonger to split the head down the middle but leave it joined at the bottom, and to scrape out the gills.
💡 Make sure the gills are gone. They hold blood and grit and will make the whole platter taste bitter and muddy — this is the one thing you cannot fix later.
Rinse the head thoroughly under cold water, working into every crevice, then pat it dry.
Rub it inside and out with the Shaoxing wine and the sliced ginger, and leave it 10 minutes.
Heat 30 ml of oil in a small pan over medium and fry the minced ginger and half the garlic for 30 seconds, then add the duo jiao, soy and sugar and fry 1 minute more.
💡 Frying the duo jiao first takes the raw, brine-y edge off it and blooms the colour. Straight from the jar it tastes flat and one-note salty.
Lay the two whole scallions across a heatproof platter and set the fish head on top, cut side up, opened out flat.
💡 The scallions lift the fish off the plate so steam circulates underneath. Without them the bottom sits in its own liquid and steams unevenly.
Spoon the fried duo jiao evenly over the whole cut surface, pushing it into the crevices so no fish shows through.
Have the steamer already at a furious boil before the fish goes in — lots of steam, lid rattling.
💡 Never start fish in a cold steamer. Slowly warming fish turns the flesh mealy and grey; it needs a hard blast of steam from the first second to set the protein cleanly.
Steam over the hardest boil you can manage for 10–12 minutes, depending on the size of the head.
Test at the thickest part behind the eye: the flesh should just flake away from the bone and be opaque white all the way through.
💡 One minute too long and the cheeks — the best meat on the whole head — go dry and cottony. If in doubt, pull it early; it carries on cooking on the hot platter.
Scatter the sliced scallion and the remaining raw garlic over the top.
Heat the last 20 ml of oil until it smokes and pour it straight over the scallion and garlic so it hisses.
Serve it in the middle of the table and let everyone pick at it — the cheeks and the collar first.
When the head is picked clean, boil the noodles and slide them onto the platter, tossing them through the chili and fish juices left behind.
💡 Do not skip this. The pool of chili, fish juice and hot oil at the bottom of the platter is what everyone actually came for, and in Hunan the noodles are not an afterthought — they are the second half of the dish.

💡 Petua

Beginner's mistake: substituting fresh chili or gochujang for duo jiao. It will not work. Duo jiao is chili salted and fermented in a jar for weeks, and its sourness and funk are the entire point — fresh chili gives you heat with none of the character, and the dish becomes just a spicy steamed fish.
A fish head sounds intimidating and is genuinely the cheapest way to eat the best part of the fish. The cheek, the collar and the gelatinous bits behind the eye are what Chinese cooks prize; the fillet is the part they consider dull.
If you truly cannot get duo jiao, the honest answer is to make a different dish rather than fake this one. But you can approximate: mince 150 g fresh red chili with 2 tsp salt and 1 tbsp of brine from a jar of pickles, and leave it at room temperature for three days.
Two heads, two flavours is the restaurant trick: cover one half with red duo jiao and the other with the yellow-green fermented chili (黄剁椒), and the same fish gives you two completely different mouthfuls.
The steaming water must be at a violent boil before the fish goes in and must stay there. Lifting the lid to peek drops the temperature and adds minutes, which is exactly what dries the cheeks out — set a timer and leave it alone.