Making a Delicious Taiwanese Lunar New Year Feast
Family dinner on Lunar New Year's eve is one of the holiday's most important traditions. TaiwanPlus and chef Ivy Chen take an in-depth look at some of the signature dishes and their connection with luck in the new year.
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00:00 Ivy Chen has been teaching people how to cook traditional Taiwanese food for over 25 years.
00:08 And in her pursuit of culinary perfection, she's also become an encyclopedia of Taiwanese
00:13 food culture.
00:14 So this is soy sauce made in Taiwan, basically with soybean and wheat, and that's a Japanese
00:21 technique.
00:22 So when Japanese colonized Taiwan 100 years ago, they left this technique to Taiwan.
00:29 Ivy is the perfect person to teach us how to make traditional Taiwanese Lunar New Year
00:33 cuisine.
00:34 Today, we're learning how to make Taiwanese-style sweet and sour fish and fried rice cake.
00:40 Each dish has an important role to play during the Lunar New Year.
00:44 Fish in the New Year, symbolic meaning is "年年有余," so it means you have abundant
00:51 food for the next year.
00:52 So this is the must dish that we prepare for Taiwanese New Year party.
00:58 And we are going to have another rice cake.
01:02 Ivy starts off by teaching us how to prep the fish, in this case, sea bass.
01:08 We marinate it with a mixture of salt, white pepper and rice wine.
01:12 The marinade is actually for people to remove the fishy flavor, but I would say if your
01:18 fish is fresh enough, you can skip it.
01:21 While we let the fish marinate, we chop vegetables and make the sauce out of soy sauce, two kinds
01:26 of vinegar and sugar.
01:28 Camerolization is not very common in Taiwanese cuisine.
01:32 We actually just add the celery, like a cornstarch and water to make it thick, not reduction.
01:40 Then it's time to coat the fish with egg yolk and sweet potato starch and fry it.
01:45 The fish is deep fried because it's first offered to ancestral spirits before dinner.
01:51 Because food stay on the offering table will last for two, three hours.
01:56 If your food is not deep fried, they won't last that long for freshness.
02:01 Or the heads, one side.
02:04 Like this?
02:05 Yeah, like this.
02:06 Okay.
02:07 Let go, hold the tail.
02:09 Yes.
02:10 Yeah, great!
02:11 After that, we cook the vegetables, finish the sauce and pour it over the fish.
02:24 The second dish, Nian Gao, is a little more straightforward.
02:28 Nian Gao, New Year rice cake.
02:30 It's made from glutinous rice and today I choose the raisin flavor.
02:36 We make a wet batter out of cake flour, cornstarch and egg.
02:40 I've made this before.
02:41 I made it kind of from memory.
02:42 My dad used to make this when I was a kid, but he never taught me.
02:47 And so I would just dip Nian Gao in egg and then fry it.
02:50 I didn't know to add flour or anything.
02:53 We cut up our Nian Gao, dip it in the batter and fry it too.
02:57 We finish with a little icing sugar and there you have it.
03:01 Fried Nian Gao.
03:02 A simple but delicious New Year's treat.
03:05 Andy Hsu, Luffy Lee, Leslie Liao and Tiffany Wong for Taiwan Plus.
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