Cooking the soup

Cooking the fish is actually very simple. (I guess my descriptions sound more complicated that it really is.)

Here, you will see me using a special apparaturs dedicated to "double-boiling". Because double-boiling is quite a common method of cooking in Hong Kong and China, manufacturers have designed and marketed a special apparatus for that purpose. However, it is not a must to use it. You can also double-boil using common utensils. I'll explain separately in another post.

The ingredients to be double-boiled are to be placed in a sturdy pot with lid, preferably double-lids (one inside, one outside). Again, the pot here is a specially designed one, for double-boiling. Using two lids has the advantage of making sure there's no (or minimum) evaporation of moisture from the ingredients. If you do not have this kind of pot, you can use some other pot as long as it has a fairly tight lid.

Place all the ingredients inside the pot, in any way or order you like. The only thing I would suggest (just from my experience, not mentioned in any reference book) is that the Tin Mah should preferably be placed inside or on the surface of the fishhead, not in direct contact with the pot. This is because the Tin Mah, if placed in direct contact with the pot, would become sticked to the pot after cooking and not easy to remove. (I would eat the Tin Mah after cooking.)

Apart from all the ingredients I've mentioned, also place 2 or 3 small pieces of ginger. (Freshly cut, not those that have already been used for steaming the Tin Mah beforehand.) This is merely to remove the smell of fish which some people regard as unpleasant.

As regards the amount of water to be added for making the soup, none of my reference books gave precise amounts. In fact, the first time I cooked the soup, I did not even add water at all because I wanted the resulting dish to be more concentrated. Even though I did not add water, the finished dish had a small amount of soup because the ingredients (fishhead etc.) carried some water from washing. (The dish did miracle on my TN from that very first time.)

Afterwards when I cooked the dish again, I added small amounts of water, especially when the fishhead is big. Sometimes when I could not finish eating the whole dish, I would refrigerate half of it, to be eaten the next day (after re-heating). That was when I no longer suffered from TN pain.

In summary, you don't need to add a lot of water to make the soup. I would say one to two small cups (the size of cup which you use for having English tea) is sufficient.

After closing the lid(s) of the pot, the pot is placed in the apparatus for double-boiling. The apparatus has been filled with a certain amount of warm water. (Warm water is used merely to reduce the time required for heating up.) The amount of water is such that, when being boiled, it will not spill over and get into the pot containing the ingredients.

It is visible in one of the photos that there is a steel stand placed inside the apparatus. In other words, the pot containing the ingredients to be double-boiled - partly (not wholly) immersed in water - is placed on the steel stand while the whole thing is heated from the bottom of the apparatus.

The time of double-boiling the fishhead (with Tin Mah etc.) is 2 hours. Therefore, you see me setting the timer of the apparatus to "2".

The double-boiling apparatus has its own lid. It is of course to be closed; and the whole thing is left to boil for 2 hours. The last photo shows the double-boiling apparatus in action. (You also see two marks, which are the maximum water levels to be used for double-boiling. One mark is the maximum water level when a large pot is used; another for a small pot. Sometimes people double-boil a small amount of ingredients in a small pot; and the amount of boiling water required in the apparatus is therefore smaller.)

In separate posts, I'll explain more about "double-boiling" (and its differences with "steaming" if the two sound confusing to you); and will also show the finished dish.