Thai steamed fish is one of my favorite dishes to eat! I love how soft & simple the fish is paired with a burst of flavor from the sauce/soup. I always make sure to take a spoon-full of the garlicky, spicy, and sour broth with every pieces of fish. The best part? it’s SUPER simple to make, you probably already have all the ingredients at home!

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A post shared by ʏᴇɴ ᴋɪᴍ ᴘʜᴀɴ · sғ ғᴏᴏᴅ ʙʟᴏɢɢᴇʀ (@foodiswhyimbroke) on Apr 5, 2020 at 3:40pm PDT

Here are all the ingredients I used

Before we begin, this recipe is for a 2 lb barramundi fish! There are two parts to this, the fish and the sauce. you can choose to steam the fish first or you can make the sauce first. However, I found that since steaming the fish only takes 10 mins, the fish gets cold once i’m done making the sauce. So let’s start with the sauce first. if you have super fast hands and can work at hyper speed, do whatever you want.

Cut the ingredients

In a small pot, bring 1 cup of chicken stock to a boil, then toss in 2 tbsp of palm sugar until dissolved. Remove from heat and pour this broth into a bowl for the assembly. Mince 2 heads of garlic (or as many as you want because you can never have enough garlic). Also chop up 4 Thai Chili (or more if you’re up for it.) Actually, chop up the cilantro too, about 20 sprigs. Basically, cut up everything, thanks.

Squeeze the lime!

Highly recommend you use fresh squeezed lime juice for this, the flavor will be so much better! Squeeze 3 whole lime into a small bowl. That should equate to about 6 tablespoon of lime juice. It is ok if it isn’t exact, because we can always adjust later.

Assemble the ingredients!

Ok, remember the broth we poured into a bowl earlier? it’s ok if you don’t remember, go look for it and bring it back. Once you have it, SUPER EASY, all you have to do is dump the cilantro, chili, garlic, and lime juice into that broth. Add about 6 tbsp of fish sauce into this mixture and stir until it becomes perfect. it’s ok if it isn’t, not everything in life has to be. Now, this part is up to you, taste the broth and see if it’s to your liking, you might want it spicier or sweeter or more sour, adjust it to your taste bud. Once that’s done. set aside.

The fish!!! Finally.

Yeah yeah, okay. Time to do stuff with this fish that you bought. I had the people at the grocery store gut and scale the fish for me because I am not about that life. If you want to, do it. Anyway, score the fish with 3 diagonal incisions on each side. If you don’t know how to score a fish, you can probably youtube it or something. I’m sorry, I should probably be more helpful. If you watch the full video, I think there’s a snippet in there about that. Once that’s done, cut up 3 stalks of lemongrass, but only use the bottom parts. Take the lemongrass, and LITERALLY SMASH it a few times to open up that flavor. Then shove it inside the fish like the picture above. This will help kill the fishiness and giving it a nice smell.

Steam the fish!!!!

Okay, this part is pretty simple. I don’t have a large pot so I’ll use my wok, I also don’t have a proper steaming system so I just use something to prop up the plate. You can actually use balls of foil at the bottom to hold up the plate. Just make sure that you can actually close the lid so no steam escaped. (my fish was too long so I had to cut the tail lol.) Steam the fish on high heat for 10-15 minutes. After 10 minutes check to see if the fish is fully cooked, use a fork to pull the meat from the bone, if it’s firm it’s cooked, if its slimy or transparent then put it back in for another 5 minutes.

ASSEMBLE THE FISH!

Make sure you have a large enough plate or pan to assemble your fish, you can literally use your baking pan haha. Cut up 2 stalks of Chinese celeries and put it at the bottom of the pan/plate. Then put the fish on top of that. Take a spoon and scoop up the mixture on top of the fish and pour the remaining broth into the pan. THAT’S IT! It’s ready to eat! Enjoy with a bowl of jasmine rice.