Bones in fish: Can you hack em?

[thelaowaichef]

I for one am a huge hater of bones in fish. And as you know, the majority of Chinese fish dishes are loaded with bones. I personally can't stand them. What is your opinion when it comes to bones in these dishes?

 

There is however at least one Chinese dish that I know of that does NOT have bones. It's called song zi yu, and it is a dish from Dongbei. It's a large lake fish that is sliced and breaded and fried, and looks JUST LIKE a blooming onion from Outback Steakhouse (With a head on it...) covered in sweet and sour sauce. Absolute perfection!

[liuzhou]

Bones don't bother me in the least.

[thelaowaichef]

5 minutes ago, liuzhou said:

Bones don't bother me in the least.

 

Ni shi zhong guo ren ma?

 

I guess I started dreadfully hating bones when I was on a 17 hour train ride to Shanghai and I got a fish bone caught in my throat for the duraton of the journey. It was really a miserable experience.

[liuzhou]

4 minutes ago, thelaowaichef said:

Ni shi zhong guo ren ma?

No. See profile.

I've had quite a few Chinese fish dishes which didn't contain bones.

 

Edited April 29, 2016 by liuzhou (log)

[thelaowaichef]

5 minutes ago, liuzhou said:

No. See profile.

I've had quite a few Chinese fish dishes which didn't contain bones.

 

 

Sweet blog man. Nice to see another laowai here! Out of curiousity, can you recall what Chinese dishes you had without bones?

[liuzhou]

10 minutes ago, thelaowaichef said:

Sweet blog man. Nice to see another laowai here! Out of curiousity, can you recall what Chinese dishes you had without bones?

 

Thanks.

 

I recall the dishes, but not their names (if they even had names).

Edited April 29, 2016 by liuzhou (log)

[Duvel]

Usually the "squirrel fish" preparation that you are referring to has bones, they are just removed during the prep.

Smaller fish can be prepared in nanban-zuke/escabeche-style so you soften or dissolve the tiny bones in the acidic marinate. Works wonders for conger ...

I have not encountered any fish that had no bones so far. But the markets here are full of interesting species.

[liuzhou]

Just came back from a shopping trip which involved visiting two supermarkets. Both had various frozen filleted fish such as hake, sea bream, tilapia, pangasius (basa fish) etc. Someone must be buying these fish or they wouldn't stock them.

 

I never buy them. I prefer fresh fish. Depending on how I intend to prepare them I may or may not fillet them myself.

[Thanks for the Crepes]

I like fresh fish too, and am so thankful that I have a few local sources. One of the boniest fish that I enjoy is croaker. Both the Atlantic and the fresh water variety are tasty, but I think I prefer the freshwater kind. It takes patience and care to safely partake, but in my opinion, it's very worth it. I can also get my fishmongers to fillet larger fish for me or buy frozen fillets at any grocery store. As with any bony fish, even fillets may have a stray bone or two. When I cook a fillet, while I wash it, I use my fingertips to feel for any bones. These can be pulled out of the flesh with a clean pair of needlenose pliers.

 

The Chinese/Pan-Asian restaurants in these parts serve many dishes with boneless fish, but maybe they are adapted to Western tastes. They also serve many dishes with whole gutted fish that come complete with head (eyes!), tails and fins. All are delicious to me.

 

Here's a link to a photo of Sweet and Sour Grouper that was posted on Yelp about a dish from Banana Leaf. Here's another link to a photo of Super Wok's take on Fish Cut Like Squirrel Tail. I can't say that one looks like a Bloomin' Onion. Both restaurants are right in my neighborhood, and both linked dishes are served boneless. I did run across a stray bone or five in the Sweet and Sour Grouper once. It happens. It will never stop me from enjoying fish, though. 

[liuzhou]

A few years ago, I was in a small guest house in the middle of nowhere in China when this group of foreign tourists turned up. I won't identify their nationality in case I am accused of stereotyping. But just let me say I could speak their language (but didn't let on). I also speak Chinese.
 

The guest house, which is run by a lovely couple, does an evening meal at a very low fixed price. Cooked by the woman. No menu. You get what the family are having. Real Chinese home cooking. Utterly delicious

This group demanded "fish with no bones". (The tour leader spoke some basic Chinese). As it happened, the meal was fish based. Beer fish - a local speciality, With bones.

The woman lost the rag and went into a rant in Chinese while waving her cleaver with evil intent. She is normally as sweet as pie.

"If you want to eat XXXXland food, why have you come to China? Go back to XXXXland and eat your tasteless food! You can have fish with bones or nothing!"

 

The group grumbled and moaned and railed against the ignorance of the Chinese and the stupidity of of eating food with bones.

"The chicken in that other place had bones, too!"

Then it got nasty. They finished their meal and had several beers. When it came time to pay, they tried to claim that the set price for the meal included the beer which it certainly didn't. I heard them discussing their plan to demand free beer for revenge on bones.

They had seen my chatting with the couple in Chinese so they knew I spoke Chinese, but they were astonished when I used their language to tell them that they were well out of order and that beer is never included in the set price for a meal in any country including their country - one I have lived in.

They really were the rudest people.

Later that evening, after they had all crept off to bed knowing they had been rumbled, the couple told me that all the local tourist spots have a warning system. Most tourists follow well worn paths a la Lonely Planet. When one obnoxious group turns up, each hotel/guest house/restaurant passes on the information to the next. They knew this lot were coming before they got there, but can't afford to turn down business.

I just don't understand people who travel to other cultures but expect those cultures to follow their norms. Why bother going anywhere?
 

Edited February 8, 2022 by liuzhou
clarification (log)

[pastrygirl]

I don't mind a few bones. Most animals we eat have them, and cooking on the bone adds flavor. 

 

I have a hard time eating some preps, for example dishes where poultry is chopped into smaller pieces including bone, but that's more because I feel so inelegant trying to navigate bony, larger than bite sized pieces via chopsticks. 

 

I did have one dish in Bhutan that I couldn't handle because of bones. Kitchen staff took some chicken carcasses and hacked them to tiny bits then made a delicious curry for staff lunch. But it was at least half shards of bone, too tedious to try to eat around and too hard on my teeth to eat. I don't believe it was a traditional dish, just cooks trying to stretch the available meat. It still boggled my mind that anyone could eat it. 

[Shalmanese]

For most fish served whole, there's a simple technique to eating them and completely avoiding all the bones. First separate the upper and lower filet on the top and slide them across, then grasp the tail and pull the entire spine out in one go. You're left with 4, boneless filets of fish.

[Thanks for the Crepes]

@Shalmanese, your technique will work with many fish, but definitely not with croaker. They're small bony throughout and delicious enough to motivate me to carefully pick and enjoy the flesh.

[liuzhou]

In some parts of China,  mainly coastal, when a whole fish is served it is customary to pick away the flesh on the uppermost side until the spine is exposed and the flesh on that side all gone. Then the bones are lifted out as described by @Shalmanese and eating of the lower part commences. On no account is the fish flipped on the serving plate. That would be terribly taboo. It is seen as suggestive of a fishing boat capsizing, and so an omen of bad luck.

 

In other places, the fish is happily flipped.

Edited May 1, 2016 by liuzhou
grammar (log)

[heidih]

Yes I was taught the method that Shalmanese describes.  Personally I have no issue picking around the bones and pulling an errant little bit out of my mouth - but I usually eat with folks who enjoy their food more than "manners".  I had to laugh the other day when the cashier at the grocery store was discussing his love of local lake fishing with the customer in front of me. I asked him what he catches and he included the comment that he gives the trout away (versus bass, catfish etc). His reason was that the bones are a pain. When I mentioned baking or panfrying whole with skin on and then easily peeling skin off and proceeding as Shalmanese noted he was astounded and assured me he would try it next time.

[huiray]

Cantonese-style steamed pompano, before-and-after.  :-)

(From this post; scroll down)

 

 

 

Happily demolished by chopsticks, progressively picking off pieces and sucking on the bones-plus-gelatinous-flesh from the belly region too. (Those belly bones were plucked out from my mouth by chopsticks and deposited on another little saucer, I imagine - I don't remember specifically now.  :-D )

 

ETA: On further reflection I must have flipped the fish shown above after eating the "first side" otherwise the positioning of the initial fish and the bony carcass would not make sense. I've done this in other cases too. Then again, I also "peel off" the backbone/spine plus head in other cases; or break the spine just behind the head then peel off the spine from there to the tail before eating the"bottom half". Yes, if I go after the cheeks then of course I would need to flip the head over in any of the three cases to get both cheeks.

Edited May 1, 2016 by huiray (log)

[kayb]

Here in the rural South, buffalo (a relative, I think of catfish, but much bonier) is often considered a "trash fish," but is highly prized by descendants of the rural African-American community and white sharecroppers alike. My eldest daughter had a babysitter who gleefully canned buffalo "steaks," or crosswise cuts of the fish, which she processed in the pressure canner for 45 minutes. The bones became soft and crumbly, like those in canned salmon (another "soul food" staple, in salmon croquettes, which I love to this day). She'd sub it for salmon, and I tried my best to show up to pick my daughter up about dinnertime on those days.

 

[suzilightning]

That is why growing up we had boiled potatoes whenever we had fish.   In case there were a slender bone we would eat the potato and it would help ease the bone down.......at least that is what I grew up being told.

[kayb]

46 minutes ago, suzilightning said:

That is why growing up we had boiled potatoes whenever we had fish.   In case there were a slender bone we would eat the potato and it would help ease the bone down.......at least that is what I grew up being told.

I remember going to a local catfish restaurant (I grew up on the Tennessee River) when I was a kid and getting choked on a catfish bone. Waitress brought out a couple of slices of soft white bread for me. Worked!

 

[gfweb]

I despise bony fish meat. Annoying.  Probably why pike were made into quenelles by the French. Good move.

[Thanks for the Crepes]

I like the sort of gelatinous flavorful stuff around some fish bones, that huiray mentioned. Savory bone lollipops.  There's so much extra flavor that's lost when this fish is boned. In fact, I rarely buy filleted salmon. My favorite way to enjoy it is steaks cut thick through the spine and grilled with bones and skin intact. Salmon with bones isn't even a challenge to eat because the bones are big and won't come away from the spine like the tiny fine bones of croaker that many end up in one's mouth and need to be picked out with fingers or chopsticks if one has skill with them. I know a lot of people don't want to have to do any work to eat plated food, and my husband is usually in that category, but bone-in grilled salmon steaks and fried croaker are so delicious they're worth the effort even to him, and I am very happy about that. 

[liuzhou]

2 hours ago, kayb said:

I remember going to a local catfish restaurant (I grew up on the Tennessee River) when I was a kid and getting choked on a catfish bone. Waitress brought out a couple of slices of soft white bread for me. Worked!

 

 

Yes, soft white bread was what I was always given to deal with bones, when I was a kid

[Thanks for the Crepes]

I guess I'm lucky in that I can always feel even a small chip of bone from, say pork that wasn't washed by a restaurant to get the bone chips from the saw off the meat or even very small, fine fish bones. I had a little trouble with it right after my stroke because my lips and tongue weren't up to speed, but I could still feel them and very awkwardly fish them out with fingers. I don't believe I've ever swallowed one, and I'm thankful for that. Good to know y'all's helpful remedies if I ever do though. 

 

They say that once fine fish bones get past the esophagus, that the hydrochloric acid in the stomach can make short work of them. 

 

[Franci]

This bring to my mind a trip we had in Istanbul where my (chinese) husband couldn't resist the smell of grilled mackerel and got a small mackerel full with bones in between bread. Ah, ah, he tried very hard and couldn't eat it!

Talking about a chinese fried fish dish with little bones that I LOVE, my mother in law, shanghainese, used to cook all the time. I think it's Xun Yu ( 上海茉莉花茶熏魚 but I copied on Internet, my Mandarin is like baby level :-)))

I think there was another recipe with scabbard fish but I don't know the name, actually if anybody could help me finding the possible recipe would be great. My mother in law English is not that great and nobody in the family (my son included) is patient enough to translate for me (or they lack the vocabulary in english)

Edited May 2, 2016 by Franci (log)

[Wayne]

 

I love fresh fish however the availability in my area is mediocre to poor. We don't have a dedicated fish market such as SeaCore and Diana's in Toronto (which I'll drop into whenever in T.O.) and the local grocery store offerings are sad. Mostly frozen fillets. Finding whole red snapper or mackerel is a fantasy. The local fishery is Lake Erie for yellow perch and walleye but very seasonal and expensive.

 

Most of the fresh fish I catch myself in season in central and northern Ontario (Georgian Bay, lake and river fishing).

Although I prefer cooking and eating whole fish (head and all) some species have to be handled with the most suitable method.

In short: Fillet and skin: pike and walleye (not forgetting the cheeks), perch, bass and any large laker or steelhead over 8-9 lbs.

              Whole: smelt, brook and lake trout under 2 lbs.

Not really inflexible rules as, if I had the good fortune to catch one, a whole walleye makes a fantastic roasted whole fish to be picked off the bones.

 

If I can visit my sister in Nova Scotia the availability of fish is outstanding. Either fish freshwater or tap the network of relatives and friends who always seem to know someone.

 

@liuzhou

That group probably acts the same way in their home country.