Written by Seafood Uncle
Photo courtesy of the Shangqing Photography Friends Association
This article is an excerpt from the magazine Knowledge is Power
In the hot summer, coupled with the small long holiday is coming soon, many people will choose to go to the beach for a vacation. And go to the beach for a holiday to play, how can you eat less seafood?
Do you prefer squid, shrimp or clams? If you're still eating these common seafood, it's really weak! This article will introduce you to some rare seafood, let's feast your eyes together!
Dangerous bearded fish — the streaked eel
Line-striped eel catfish, commonly known as sand wool, has its distribution in the East China Sea, The Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea.
Prominent signs of the line-striped eel are scaleless, large head and gradually flattened body, with four pairs of whiskers at the mouth. It is a warm water coastal social fish, the juvenile fish group activity is particularly obvious, when encountering external disturbances will quickly gather, forming a dense sphere, swimming rapidly to rotate to protect themselves, fishermen call it "catfish ball".
The striated eel is also a dangerous marine fish. Why is it dangerous?
It turns out that the hard spines of the dorsal fin and pectoral fin of this fish have poisonous glands and are densely covered with jagged barbs, and if accidentally stabbed, the light will be severe pain, and the most serious will be life-threatening. The folk saying "one stingray (stingray), two tigers (Chinese ghost fish, Japanese ghost fish), and three sand hair (line striated eel)" summarizes the ranking of poisonous spiny fish in the marine world, and the line eel ranks third.
However, you don't have to worry too much, most of the sand hair fish in the market has been cut off the hard spines in advance to avoid customers getting hurt when buying fish.
Tasting Cheats: How to cook the sand fish you buy home to be delicious? Cut the sand fish into sections, season, pat the flour and fry to remove. Bring water starch to a boil, add a little angelica, fried ginger slices, garlic, shallots and soy sauce, mix well with the fish and collect the juice. Before cooking, simmer the pot with a small amount of rice wine and add sesame oil. Its taste resembles eel.
Scaly pipe fish with no scales all over the body
Scaly pipe fish, shaped like a red pipe, and like a whip made of red coral, commonly known as whipfish. It resembles a moray eel, but has nothing to do with moray eels. From a taxonomic point of view, the scaly pipe fish is closer to the seahorse and the sea dragon.
It is commonly found in the East China Sea, the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea, and the maximum body length can reach about 2 meters. When swimming in the water, its whole body is stiff and straight, swooping and swinging, not at all like a moray eel swaying with its soft body.
How to identify whether the whipfish is new or not? The redder the whipfish, the fresher it is! The whipfish that has just left the water is red and shiny. As the freshness deteriorates, it slowly turns to ochre red, or even completely fades to light brown.
Tasting cheats: Whipfish are mostly caught in the method of flowing gillnets and bottom trawlers, which are edible fish with less delicious spines, but there are not many people who have eaten it, and the cooking method is mostly to cut into sections and braised. The head of the whipfish is about 1/4 of its body length, and its bone is hard, so it is necessary to chop off the head before cooking. A slender long tail in the middle of the tail fin should also be cut off, because this pointed tail hides a killing machine, densely covered with sharp serrations, and if you are not careful to grasp it with your hands, you will often be scratched.
Frog-shaped crab driving backwards
Frog-shaped crab, as the name suggests, looks like a frog. Its common name is even more varied, such as shrimp head, sea bugs, wrench crabs, and backward purr (Hokkien meaning of traveling backwards).
The frog-shaped crab head breastplate is wide, the surface of the carapace is densely covered with rough particles, and the body color is orange-red, with several white spots scattered on it. Its claws and foot are flattened and shovel-shaped, and it is a sharp tool for sand digging. When the frog crab swims in the water, it can use the telescopic curling movement of its abdominal node to travel backwards, and it can dig sand backwards and dive into the sand to hunt.
Tips: Most people see a frog crab for the first time, in a cafeteria. Cooked frog crabs are imported, the specifications are generally not large, and when they are on the table, due to the constraints of long-distance transportation cold chain conditions, resulting in water loss and poor meat taste, many people have a poor impression of this species of sea crab. In fact, from March to May every year, frog-shaped crabs produced in Penghu and Guangdong waters in Taiwan are listed in large quantities, and the crab meat is full, delicious and sweet, and the simple dry or steamed crabs are delicious, which is a cost-effective edible crab.