Nanbanzuke (Fried Fish Steeped in Hot Vinegar Marinade)

Variations

• With salmon or mackerel: larger fish in steaks or fillets, treated the same way. You lose the eat-it-whole part but it is easier to handle; fry for about three minutes.
• Chicken nanban: the same idea applied to chicken, from Miyazaki. Karaage's own variations list already names it — fried chicken dipped in the sweet-sour liquid and served with tartare sauce. The fish version is the older one; the chicken version is the one that travelled.
• Vegetables only: aubergine, lotus root and pumpkin fried and steeped the same way. They take up the liquid faster than fish, so an hour is enough.
• What the word nanban means: "southern barbarian", the word for the Portuguese and Spanish who reached Japan in the sixteenth century, and this method is taken to be escabeche arriving with them. Fry-then-steep turns up from the Mediterranean to Southeast Asia.

Tips

• The point of this dish is to soak the coating. Every other fried recipe here states the same fact from the other side. Orange chicken writes it as a warning — "A cornstarch shell is porous, so it starts drinking the sauce the moment they meet, and there is no way back." — and karaage explains why a starch shell stays crisp and records the cost in the same breath: "Coating in potato starch keeps it light and crisp far longer than flour." Those channels are the mechanism here. What leaks in everywhere else is what this dish is built to let in.
• Which is why the fish goes in hot. The air inside a shell straight out of the fryer is hot, and it contracts as it cools; the volume it gives up is filled by the marinade. Cold fish into cold liquid wets the outside and stops there. Warming the marinade is the same trick from the other end.
• A thin dusting, not a batter. Mixed with water it becomes the thick wet coating deep frying describes, and a thick coating keeps the liquid out. Dry starch goes to a thin near-glassy film, part of which dissolves into the marinade and gives it a little body.
• The bones soften twice. Frying small fish through twice makes the bones crisp, and hours in vinegar takes them further still. Eating them whole is the form of the dish, and that is the acid's second job here.
• Slice the onion with the grain. Cut across, it collapses in the liquid. With the grain it still has some snap hours later, which is the contrast against fish that has gone soft on purpose.
• The clock runs backwards. Tangsuyuk and orange chicken are served in seconds. This wants three hours minimum and is better the next day, and it keeps about four days — the vinegar and sugar are preserving as well as seasoning, which is why the dish exists at all.
• Khai luk khoei, added alongside it, chooses the opposite. That dish also brings a fried surface to a sauce, and pours the sauce over at the last moment to keep the surface dry. There are only two things a fried surface can do when it meets a sauce, and these two pages take one each.