Grilled Fish From Hsinchu Fish Market

Photos by MJ Klein

Hui-chen and I thought it would be a good idea to travel to the Hsinchu fish market ^[1] and pick up some fish for grilling. It’s hard to beat the flavor of a nice fatty fish on the grill!

^[2]
We have blogged on other fish markets before ^[3] but not on this market, which is the closest one to our home in Hukou. On this day the available selections seemed a bit lighter than usual.

^[4]
Before we went shopping for food, Hui-chen suggested that we eat at one of the restaurants. Yes, the hard-selling is still going on, and it’s still just as annoying! Here we see many of the wonderful greens that Taiwanese cuisine is famous for.

^[5]
These are soft-shelled crabs. Each restaurant cooks a representative dish of their most popular offerings. I took some shots of the more interesting ones.

^[6]

^[7]

^[8]

^[9]
I am really not sure what the blue creatures are. When I find out I will update this post!

^[10]
Naked frogs.

^[11]
Hui-chen always gives me the same look when I snap a candid of her like this. We are waiting for the dishes to arrive.

^[12]
This is our friend Michael Turton’s favorite: asparagus slathered in sweet mayo.

^[13]

This is a sweet and sour deep fried fish (shot with flash to bring out the color of the sauce). The fish was the perfect size and the flavor was just great. I liked the sauce because it wasn’t overpowering like the sweet and sour sauces in the USA.

^[14]
Standard fare: peel and eat shrimp.

^[15]

^[16]
After lunch we walked around the market and I spotted this carpet shark.

^[17]
These are very large fish eyes just waiting for someone to buy them….

^[18]
Now this is one of 2 things we came to get. I absolutely love salmon on the grill. The other thing we came to get were tuna steaks but there were not to be found. I did find a tuna subspecies tail section but I thought the price was too high.

Hui-chen carefully selected 2 beautiful salmon steaks for us.

^[19]

^[20]
These shots show just how nice the fish looked! Awesome!

^[21]
Hui-chen wanted to get some clams for a dish she had in mind.

^[22]

^[23]
These are good prices for clams. 3 baskets for NT$200, or roughly US$6.

We put the fish in the freezer and took it out on Tuesday:

^[24]
These are some of the blue shrimp that Shao–hui had the other day ^[25].

^[26]
This is a lousy shot of the salmon grilling.

^[27]
And this is the final shot of a piece of grilled salmon. I cannot tell you how good this was! The fat cooked up beautifully and created smoke that flavored the meat to perfection. I loved this meal!

technorati tags:Taiwan ^[28], Hsinchu ^[29], Hukou ^[30], grilled ^[31], fish ^[32], market ^[33]

Blogged with Flock ^[34]