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Ah…skate, most people would think of rollerskating, but in the culinary world, it’s actually refer to Stingray fin. Why? I have no idea. I found out about it when I was googling to look for source to obtain Stingray. You see, when I was planing the Chinese New Year menu, I want to have a fish dish that’s easier to cook and serve. After days of searching online, I decided to stop by the local oriental store to see if they would special order for me since they bring in fresh fish to their store almost every week.

The oriental store staff thought I wanted a whole stingray while their supplier only have stingray fin, so they thought it’s not what I want. Two weeks went by, I check with the staff at the store, and clarified that stingray fin is the only eatable part and it’s what I want, we get the price confirm, and I placed my order by putting down deposit. However, it’s already after Chinese New Year so I had to serve different fish during the Chinese New Year dinner.

So, about 1o days I placed my order, the stingray arrive and I got the call to go to the store to pick them up. Oh, I didn’t explain what happened. I was told the stingray are fresh never frozen from East coast. They caught them the night before, process and pack in the morning then ship it. When the store staff told me the price, I know I’m up for a good deal. Stingray is very hard to come by, and for never frozen fresh stingray, it’s even harder to obtain. And guess that? It cost me $2.70 a pound! I’m telling you, it’s better than those mahi mahi, dolphin, flounder etc other kind of fish that cost double or triple the price! I think it’s not reasonable for the store to ship in a couple pounds of fish for me, so I decided to order 30 lbs. After all, 30 lbs doesn’t seem like a lot, besides, I would like to do experiment of freezing and vacuum pack the stingray to see if it works well. If it works well, I will get more next time.

Anyway, the stingray shipped in on Friday morning, I picked them up in the evening after work, just in time so I can spend the weekend to treat them. So let’s get started.

I don’t have enough space to put all 30 lbs of stingray down to clean, so I just clean them half at a time. About 15 lb of stingray fin, just fit right into one side of my cleaned sink.

Ah… big and slimy alien looking thing, who would have thought it’s a jewel in the fish world? Some fins are big, and some are average size. In general, they’re not too big and can fit onto my cutting board to work with.

The stingray skin has bumpy slimy skin that’s very hard to get rid of by knife.

The bottom of the fin however is very smooth, and the skin is eatable.

I think a lot of western cook, especially the European like to serve their skate like a piece of steak, and debone the fish. However, in Malaysia, we serve the fin whole. But how do you get rid of the slimy skin? Simple answer: hot water bath! All you need to do is boil a wok/pot full of water, put the fin in a big sieve like the Chinese style sieve use for deep fry, and ladle boiling water over the skin. The skin will contract and become soft, and within seconds, it’s soft enough that you can just scrap it off using a spoon. You just have to be careful not to run the water bath too long otherwise you will partially cooked the fin.

Once you scrap off the skin, you can see the flesh underneath, and they run in one direction.

Some older/larger fin however has thorn/fang that you can’t remove, not without damage the flesh anyway. This is something new to me as the stingray in Malaysia do not have thorn, I’m pretty sure this must be a different species of stingray.

It didn’t take me long to process all the fins, it’s just a bit messy and repetitive. You have to work quick otherwise the liquid that touch the stingray will become very gelatin and slippery. The morning before I treat all the stingrays, I also made some spice paste that we use in Malaysia to cook stingray. The popular way of serving stingray in Malaysia is to rub the fin with spice paste, put them on banana leaves and grill. That’s the way we have it in the restaurant in Malaysia, and that’s the way I learned to cook stingray when I was in Malaysia. So, just rub the spice paste all over it to let it marinate for hours.

The good thing about making is myself is, I can put as much paste as I want because restaurants normally don’t put too much of the spice paste as it could be expensive and time consuming to make. I applied a thick layer of paste, so that when it get grill, the paste would caramelized and form a crust that’s super tasty.

Banana leaves is very easy to obtain these days, if you know where to get it. My local oriental store carry it, and it come frozen, which turn out is no different than the fresh one. It didn’t take long for the banana leaves to thaw, and I just apply a layer of oil on it to make sure the fish can get off easily and the banana leaves do not dry out too quickly.

Once I stack another layer of banana leave, it’s time to put the fish on it. This piece of stingray fin is very big and I want to make sure I taste the biggest one while it’s still fresh, and will freeze the other smaller fins.

Since it’s winter outside, and I feel stupid to try to fire up the grill, I decided to cook it using the oven method. But first, I need to create a hot surface so that the fin can get a head start before it goes into the oven. I really amaze myself when I gone into my basement and took out a 14″ flat pan that I bought a long time ago and seldom use. I knew I had good intension when I bought the pan, but I just don’t have reason to use it on a daily basis since I mostly cook for myself. But once in a while, I need to cook something big, and this is the reason why I made the decision to buy unusual cookware once in a while.

Anyway, just head up the pan, and then put some oil on it.

Then put the fin with the banana leave on it. Stick the whole sizzling pan into the hot oven and bake for about half an hour.

Once the time is up, take it out of the oven and you have your grilled Stingray, well, not grill technically but the result is close. You need the dry heat to cook the meat and the spice paste, and banana leaves act as a moisture retaining agent to prevent the fin from being burn, and stick to your cookware.

Upon close inspecting, this is when you know there are something that a BBQ grill can do that an oven can’t do, which is caramelize your food without burning them like what a broiler could do. The spice paste is cooked, but not crispy enough.

Those who never had stingray before probably don’t know, there is literally no bone in stingray fin, if you look at the way they swim, the fin move and glide smoothly like no bone structure in it. Well, turn out they do have a layer of bone, but the bone is so soft, it’s eatable like cartilage.

The soft bone is sandwich in between a top layer of flesh and a bottom layer of flesh.

If the fin is big, you get that thick layer of pure white moist meat, that’s just melt in your mouth like a piece of scallop or crab meat.

You know, my home town is right by the ocean and the house I grew up in is less than 15 minutes away from the ocean. Having fresh seafood is such a privilege that I started to miss a lot when I moved to the Midwest, which is hundred and thousand of miles away from the sea, and fresh seafood is either not fresh enough, or cost too much to enjoy on a regular basis. Freezing fresh fish for me is the closest thing, compare to buying fish that shipped frozen, and the grocery store thaw them and sit them on ice bed and then sell them at high price, which one would you rather eat?

After completed my Chocolate project for Valentine’s day, I had to quickly jump to my big cooking project, which is very very intimidating. What is it for? It’s for Chinese New Year!

You see, Chinese New Year fall on the same day as Valentine’s day this year, so I had to juggle two special occasions in the same week. This year I decided to cook a proper Chinese New Year meal and invite my friends over because last year we went out to a Chinese restaurant to have 12 courses Chinese New Year dinner, and it wasn’t great, and the price was a bit high for the quality of food.

The last time I cook a Chinese New Year dinner, I managed to pull it off and sort of keep things under control. But that was two years ago, and I got over about how much work went into it. So my attitude for this attempt is some what positive thinking that I can cook faster, and come out with a more ambitious menu. What’s more ambitious menu? For me, the menu is not highly difficult but more for the quality and adhere to the symbolism of Chinese New Year spirit, as well as bring out the classic of Chinese dishes.

Anyway, it’s common to have a poultry dish in Chinese family style dinner. Cooking chicken is not very difficult, but cooking duck is. Cooking a good duck dish is even more difficult as you could end up with a chewy or greasy duck. Cooking duck do require some extra prep work. Ideally you want to have a very crispy skin, which typically found in some sort of roast duck. This year I found another version of roast duck recipe that’s not difficult to do, after all, I already have all the right tool. The nice thing about this duck dish is, I can prep it the day before and stick it into the oven a few hours before serving.

To prepare the duck, I need to get the duck stand up otherwise I will have to hold the duck for a good 50 minutes, which make your biceps go jello easily. The reason for doing so is that I need to baste the duck skin with maltose glaze. Maltose is similar to honey, which is not too sweet but way sticky and thicker than any form of sugar like honey or glucose. To make the glazing possible, I need to boil the maltose with water, soy sauce and some lemon juice.

After the maltose glaze is boiling, rest the stand up duck on the wok and the next 50 minutes I pretty much stand in front of the stove to ladle and pour the boiling glaze over the duck until the liquid is gone.

The maltose glaze, which has a bit of soy sauce give the duck skin a sticky bronze looking finish. You know once it get roasted property, it will has that nice golden color skin.

Chinese New Year dinner is the time when you bring out some Chinese delicacy, normally it involve some expensive ingredient. Since I have cooked Shark fin soup in my last round of Chinese New Year dinner cook off, I decided to go with a seafood soup that use some sea cucumber.

The sea cucumber cost about $40 a pound and sold in dehydrated/dried form. For my dish, I only need about 5 oz, so it didn’t really cost me a fortune. To make sure the sea cucumber will be ready to consume by the day I need it, I need to prepare it about 3 days earlier. The preparation involve soaking the sea cucumber in simmering water for 20 minutes, changing water, soak in hot water until the water cool, follow by more changing water, de-gut the slug, more hot water bath and overnight soaking etc.

At the end of 3rd day, I got a small plate full of sea cucumber for which each one start out no smaller than half a dried prune when dried.

Taking a close up look, it really make you wonder how on earth people would think of eating this creature? Someone must be hungry to death and decide “heck, it’s dying of hunger or eat these giant slug to survive.” Joking aside, there are some study and believe in the health benefit of consuming sea cucumber, mainly in tissue repair. So, to all the body builder, want to have a sea slug after your tissue tearing hard workout from the gym?

The day of the Chinese New Year dinner started out slow. All I need to do is cut up all the vegetable and prepare my mise en place, then clean the place and set up the dining table. This year I have built a snap on table top that goes on top of my 6 seats dining table, make it possible to seat 10 person now.

Since I don’t have much time to come up with new table setting, and make no sense to invest in new dinner ware, I just set the table up like I did before.

A few hours before the guess arrive, I started to roast the duck and cooked the soup. By the time the guess started to arrive, I wast just getting started to cook my first dish. You see, good Chinese food just can’t be served too late after it’s cook, otherwise you will loose that crispy texture, or aromatic breath of wok, also known as “Wok Hei” in Cantonese. I underestimate some time that need to be spent to cook the dishes, and get distracted by my guess.

Cooking and cleaning together is not easy task, my big kitchen all of the sudden felt like it has shrunk in half because of the amount of dirty towel, pan and dishes laying around. I manage to keep the area close to the stove clear and it that as my main working area, like cutting up the roasted duck, as well as keep all the sauces nearby so I can add them into the wok before the food get burn and the wok get too hot. My 55,ooo BTU burner really shine in this event.

With all the food around, Oreo decided to stop by to check out what’s going on, and may be wishing that I will drop some chopped duck so he can snatch them up.

The cooking was completely done about a little after an hour the guess arrive. I had to put some of the guess to work like cleaning up cooking utensil, as well as taking photos.

So, my dinner menu list is quite overwhelming, not super difficult but do require some proper planing and execution to successfully get them onto the table. Let’s look at the dishes:

For appetizer, I had Spring rolls, which I count at a vegetable dish. To make sure I don’t have too much leftover, I made about 22 pieces for 7 people.

Serving rice for carbohydrate is a bit boring, so I decided to have stir fry noodle. It took me a while to find the right kind of noodle for stirfry application. Once the noodled was cooked and kept warm in the oven, it did dry out on the surface a bit.

A very classic pork dish that is everyone’s favorite is the sweet and sour pork. I created this recipe based on memory of eating them in my home town restaurant. It’s way superior than those westernized version in the Chinese restaurants in the US. The secret is using candied ginger as well as sweet pickled vegetable and fresh pineapple. For a nice presentation a pineapple bowl is the way to go, I feel bad to waste a lot of juice when carving the pineapple bowl, but hey, at least it’s only half a pineapple.

I was a bit concern when cooking this traditional Chinese New Year dish as my family never serve it before. It’s commonly found in a Buddhist household but since my family is Christian, we never cook nor ate it. The dish is call Buddha’s Delight, which is a vegetarian dish consist of various soy bean product like puff tofu, tofu stick, mushroom, fungus etc. Eating this dish for Chinese New Year is a symbolism of cleansing, just like monks who don’t eat living animal. The recipe I used called for dried oyster, so it’s technically not a true vegetarian dish. Regardless, the dish came out well and not too plain.

The roast duck came out well, not too greasy nor too tough. However, because it wasn’t serve right away, the skin was no longer crispy. The seasoning for the duck is very simple, which is just the maltose glace. To fully enjoy the duck, you should dip the duck piece into the pomegranate molasses sauce that I made a few weeks ago and froze until this Chinese New Year dinner event.

Braise pig feet is not a dish that you can find easily in Chinese restaurant around here, mainly because it needs a long time to cook, and there is virtually no demand for it. If you can find some sort of pig feet dish, they normally are very lathery nor not very tender. I cooked this dish two days ahead of time, and let it sit in the fridge for the flavor to age. It’s a five spice pig feet that’s flavored with a lot of garlic and shitake mushroom, as well as star anise and cinnamon stick. I reheat the dish and serve it in the Chinese sand pot, which hold the heat and add some nice touch to the presentation.

I need to add more vegetable dish to the menu, but cooking plain vegetable is boring to me. Therefore I decided to cook it with some delicacy like abalone. I decided to cook the sugar snap pea abalone dish that I grew up eating. The abalone I bought is produced in Mexico, so it only cost me about $12 a can, compare to the $34 a can that my brother brought me a few years ago, which was produced in Australia.

For beef dish, I decided to serve a more dramatic black pepper beef, which need to be finished at table side.

The sizzling way of service a dish can normally found in good Chinese restaurant, and home cook don’t normally attempt it. So having this dish do make the dinner feel a bit special. The aroma of the sauce hitting the dish just blanket the table with appetizing smell, but for some reason, none of my guess feel like seating at the time I’m serving it.

The seafood soup that I made with dried scallop, scallop, shrimp, sea cucumber and crab meat was keep warm in a slow cooker. The chicken stock I used as base did take away the fishiness of the seafood medley.

After a few days of preparation and a few hours of cooking, I got ourselves a Chinese New Year feast that can probably feed two two big family.

So, how many course did I cooked? It was 10, yes, T-E-N. Wait a minute, there were eight dishes on the table and a soup serve on the side, where is the 10th dish? Well, it’s a good gesture to have a fish dish in every Chinese New Year as it symbolize “excess”, which if you have the fish dish, it’s the hope that you will have plenty of excess wealth for that year. I had the fish steam in the steamer while we were eating our dinner. We don’t have room on the table to fit a fish dish yet, and it’s best to serve the fish right after it come out of the steamer for best texture and flavor.

As we started to chow down our wonderful and rich dinner, we became more and more drunk of food, hence become too lazy to take photos or even move our hand to reach for more food! I have to say, the fish was excellent, and you know why? Because it was never frozen and was still swimming the day before I cook it. I had make a special trip to the oriental store the day before to by a live fish, had the fish get hammered by a mallet, all just so we can enjoy its white sweet flesh, ah….. welcome to the food chain.

The Chinese New Year dinner overall was a succesful one, I served some reserved chocolate bonbons that I made to tie to the Valentine’s day function so I didn’t have to sweat for the dessert portion.

The dinner was a good challenge, such that I learned more about my ability in cooking Chinese food eventhough the execution wasn’t perfect that I still had to make my guess wait. However, I did very well in the planning, allowing me to cook so many dishes without staying up late at night, nor spent a fortune for it.

Will I do it again? You bet, just not next year as this type of cooking is really could burn you out, mentally and physically. For now, I’m glad to say that it’s overed, and I can catch my breath and get ready for Spring where my gardening hobby kicks in, and maintain my music hobby as well.