Vietnamese Soul Food part II (ca kho to)

I don’t normally have a lot of time to blog what I’m cooking right after I cook it, since I’m either too tire or stuffing my face, so I find it helpful to break up my blogs into different postings and write them on a different day.  I tend to write all my stuff on Word, then copy and paste them onto here; I’m paranoid that way. So if you see a ton of postings on one day, that’s the reason behind that, I’m really not that diligent.

Anyways, this post is neither about this nor that, this is about caramelized fish, and when it’s done right, it’s a beautiful thing. Now, before you picture some yucky fish sticks on a candy-apple-like contraption, rest assure that it’s nothing like that (I think).  I learned this dish from my mother (like all the other Vietnamese dishes that I cooked), but could never make it as well as she did. She got too many years of experience on me. Nevertheless, I will try my best to show you how I went about making caramelized fish.

Conceptually, this is an extremely easy dish to make. All you’ll need is a fish that can stand up to very slow cooking over a long period of time (I suggest catfish because it’s a little tougher than other fishes), sugar, salt, black pepper, and green onions; it’s the “I’ll try my best not to burn the sugar”… that’s the bitch part.

Before you start cooking: 

• Cut your fish into even slices and place into a decent side bowl for marinating
• Add the following to the bowl: about 4-5 spoon of sugar (depends on how many fish you have, I’m using 1 large catfish), 1-2 spoon of salt, black pepper, diced garlic, chopped green onions, and a little bit of water to dissolve everything. You’ll want to marinate this for about 2 hours.

Cooking Directions:

• On a medium to large pan, add a little bit of water (no oil is needed please, it doesn’t go well with water) over medium-low heat.

• Add all the components from the marinated fish bowl to the pan and wait for the sauce to reduce while cooking your fish. 

• On a separate pot, make a simple sirup (3-1 ratio of sugar to water) by mixing sugar and water together over heat until it becomes a “syrup”. The trick here is that you want to cook this syrup until it become reddish-brown (very important!) so that the sugar will dissolve completely, leaving just the unsweetened syrup. If you cook it too long, it will become bitter; not long enough, it’ll still be sweet. You can add a little bit of warm water to the mixture if your syrup is too thick.

• Ok. Now that we have our syrup and our fish is still being cooked over medium-low heat, add the syrup to the fish pan and simmer over low heat. You don’t have to mess with it much after this point, just let it cook evenly on both sides while the sauce reduce.

The final product should taste sweet, slightly salty, and spicy; your fish should look like it’s been caramelized in the rich-thick sauce (reddish color). This cooking method may seem complicated at first, but after a few tries, it’ll be worth the effort. It took me 2 tries just to get it right. It’s also good to know that this might not be the best dish to make when you’re really hungry, since the total cooking time is around 1 and a half hour.

To serve: sprinkle some chopped green onions on top and you’re ready to eat.