Chou guiyu, Anhui stinky mandarin fish

As tradition built it

Tradition, adapted as a monitored home ferment

Serves 4. Ferment up to 192 hours, then cook 40 minutes.

Ingredients

• 1 whole sea bass (substituting for mandarin fish, unobtainable in the UK), gutted and scaled
• 4 to 8% of the fish's weight fine salt, weighed to 4 to 8% of the fish's weight
• 200 g, sliced pork
• 2 spring, sliced bamboo shoots
• 3 tbsp soy sauce
• 2 tbsp Shaoxing wine
• 1 tbsp sugar
• 3 slices ginger
• enough to come halfway up the fish stock
• a small handful, chopped garlic chives, to finish
• 1 tsp, mixed with 1 tbsp water cornstarch, for the finishing slurry

Method

1. Weigh the gutted fish, and calculate salt at 4 to 8 percent of that weight. Rub the salt thoroughly over and inside the fish.
2. Pack the fish into a sealed, anaerobic container (a vacuum bag or a tightly sealed non-reactive vessel with the air pressed out), and hold at a cool, stable temperature, using a dehydrator with its heating element off as a controlled, airflow-managed space if the kitchen itself is not reliably cool.
3. Check daily by smell and by the flesh's firmness. Do not exceed 8 days. The fish is ready when a mild, distinct aroma has developed but the flesh is still firm and the smell has not turned to outright decay.
4. Rinse the fermented fish, score diagonally on both sides, and pan-fry until both sides turn light golden.
5. Add sliced pork and bamboo shoots, with soy sauce, rice wine, sugar, ginger and a little stock. Bring to the boil, then simmer on low heat for around 40 minutes until the sauce reduces.
6. Finish with garlic chives, a light cornstarch slurry to thicken, and a final drizzle of lard.

Notes

The exact traditional fermentation culture has not been replicated here; this is a controlled, food-safety-conscious adaptation using the salt percentage and timing parameters documented in Chinese food-science literature, not a claim to reproduce Huizhou's own microflora exactly.

What a modern chef changes

The ferment itself, monitored rather than judged by feel.

Rung 6

Method

1. Log the salt percentage, the container's internal temperature and the day-by-day smell and firmness change, treating the ferment as a documented process rather than a folk instinct, exactly as this chapter's Rung 6 asks.
2. Hold the ferment in a dedicated, temperature-logged chamber (the dehydrator, unheated, with a simple thermometer inside) rather than an ambient kitchen corner, for real reproducibility between attempts.
3. State plainly to anyone eating it that this is an adapted, monitored fermentation, not a reproduction of Huizhou's traditional microflora: the honesty this chapter insists on elsewhere applies to this dish's method as much as to its sourcing.