When frying, it should be fried twice, the first time it is shaped, and the second time it is mature and colored.
First, material selection.
In order to ensure the quality of meatball dishes, material selection is very important. Fish should choose fresh, high meat yield and strong water absorption varieties, such as mullet, octopus, toothfish, rock carp, etc. Shrimp should choose white shrimp or fresh shrimp meat; The lean meat of livestock should be lean meat without fascia, and the fat meat should be thick and without blood spots; Some raw materials such as eggs and vegetables must be fresh.
Second, the preliminary processing
1. Primary processing of fish: after cleaning the fish, feed the knife from the back of the fish, take two clean fish from beginning to end, then lay the skin flat on the pier, cut the fish with the back of the knife, and then scrape the fish gently along the lines of the fish with the tip of the knife. Note: scrape until the blood tendon is exposed, and then carefully chop it open. When chopping, the knife should be light, and the finer the chop, the better until the fish turns white and sticky.
2. Initial processing of clean lean meat, clean chicken breast, clean shrimp and mutton: When processing these meats, the method of coarse cutting and fine chopping should be adopted. When the muscle fiber of this kind of meat is destroyed, the protein contained in it will be released, thus forming a sticky sol, which is the easiest to absorb water. However, some meatball dishes do not need to be too delicate in the initial processing, such as making fried meatballs, four-happiness meatballs, Yangzhou lion head and so on. If they are too fine, they taste bad.
3. For some raw materials with coarse muscle fiber and old meat quality, such as beef, meatball dishes are carefully chopped, which not only makes the entrance tender and smooth, but also enlarges the heating surface and shortens the cooking time because the muscle fiber is chopped during making.
4. Cutting vegetables and vegetarian meatballs are not so complicated, just chop them evenly according to the characteristics of the dishes.
5, there are some raw materials for making meatballs, but they don't need to be chopped, such as yam, potatoes, tofu and so on. Just cook it first and then press it into mud with a knife.
Third, the semi-finished product of meatballs-mud
Mud: Mashed mud, which is a semi-finished product for making meatball dishes. It can be divided into soft clay, hard clay and coarse clay. Let's talk about three kinds of mud preparation techniques respectively.
1, modulation of soft clay
The sizing process of soft clay requires higher requirements. The mud before and after pulping is completely different. The slurry after sizing is milky white, sticky and fine in texture, and the slurry after sizing is much more expansive than the slurry without sizing. For example, 200 grams of fish sauce can squeeze out more than 40 balls smaller than table tennis. The secret here lies in mixing and sizing. When mixing and sizing, the mud should move in one direction mechanically, in order to force the mud to sink. Because the arrangement of water molecules is directional, it should also be in one direction when stirring. You must not stir back and forth or pause, but must do it in one go.
Adding water, salt, oil and egg white scientifically is the key to ensure the quality of soft clay. You must decide how much water to use according to the quality of the mud and the standard of the dishes. Take 500 grams of fish sauce as an example. Generally, the draft is about 400g. Of course, this is not absolute, but also depends on the type and temperature of the fish and the chopping of the fish. Salt needs to be combined with water. My experience is that water-salt mixed sizing is a more scientific mixed sizing method. The mixed sizing of salt and water can be carried out step by step from the surface to the inside, and the sizing can be formed with the water consumption of mud. Generally, the salt consumption per 500g mud can be between 3 and 4g. When the mud is fully stirred, add the beaten egg paste and white oil and stir well.
Adding egg-soaked paste is mainly to make use of the property that egg white is denatured into solid by heating, and consciously increase the viscosity of the mud, so that the mud becomes white and soft. In addition, adding white oil at last can make meatballs soft and tender, which has the function of enhancing fragrance.
2, the modulation of hard mud
Hard clay, that is, the primary processing raw material of meatballs usually used for frying, frying, burning and stewing, is different from soft clay. Because the meatballs made of hard mud are dry, fragrant and crisp, and the outside is burnt and the inside is tender, don't add too much water when making hard mud. If you mix too much water, it will swell when frying, but it will shrink and soften after cooling. The proportion of fat meat and lean meat in hard mud should be moderate, and the fat meat must not be put away. Because fat meat can soften meatballs and enhance flavor when frying.
The above method is also suitable for making hard mud such as beef and chicken, but the method of making hard mud with fish and shrimp as raw materials is slightly different.
First of all, in order to prevent meatballs from dying, you can add proper amount of egg white and bread crumbs to the hard mud of fish and shrimp, because this can play a role in puffing and shaping meatballs. Secondly, because the hard mud of fish and shrimp does not need too much draught, the dosage of starch must be correctly grasped. Due to the strong water absorption of starch, if too much starch is added, the meatballs will form a hard shell on the outside after heating, and the inside will become sticky, which will affect the taste of meatballs. Of course, if you add less starch, it will make the meatballs loose and lose their proper flavor.
3, the modulation of coarse mud
Coarse mud is widely used in meatball dishes, and it is also a good preparation. Coarse mud is usually made by chopping seasonal vegetables into stuffing and adding flour, tofu, vermicelli and seasoning. The balls fried with coarse mud can be used as dishes alone or in combination, such as fried cabbage balls, radish balls, vermicelli tofu balls and so on. Can be mixed with other raw materials for cooking, or stewed, roasted and fried, and has a wide range of applications. What needs to be emphasized here is that when chopping coarse mud, it is not necessary to chop it too finely or use too much water.
Fourth, the formation of meatballs.
No matter which cooking method is used to make meatballs, they must be shaped by hand first. Some people don't squeeze meatballs by hand, but spoon them or pull them by hand. The meatballs made in this way are different in size, not beautiful, and the surface is not smooth. Actually, making meatballs by hand is not too difficult. The simple method is: grab a handful of stirred mud with your left hand and squeeze it out with your index finger and thumb. Don't use force when squeezing, you should have both virtual strength and real strength. And the index finger bends and the thumb slides back and forth, making the meatballs smooth. Of course, the other three fingers should also cooperate to let the mud squeeze out, and then scoop the squeezed mud into a small boiling water pot or oil pan with a hand spoon.
However, not all meatballs are extruded by hand, such as Yangzhou lion head, which is made by the method of group. In other words, the clay ball is round, smooth and shaped by the left and right hands. In addition, meatballs can also be squeezed into oval, orange petal, jade pendant and so on.
Five, the temperature and color control of cooking meatballs
When making meatballs, there are many ways to heat them, but there are only two commonly used methods: blanching and frying. You know, any cooking method has the best cooking time, and of course it changes with the change of raw materials. Take fish balls for example. I think it is the best time to make fish balls with ringing water. If the fish balls are cooked in a cold water pot, the internal and external temperatures of the fish balls will be balanced. After heating, the water and nutrients in the fish balls will move outward. Because the water is gradually heated, the external heating pressure will change the umami taste inside the fish balls, dissolve in the water, and make the fish balls lose umami taste. But it's not good to put the fish balls in a boiling pot, because the fish balls are tender and can't stand the impact of boiling water, which will affect the formation of the fish balls. From the point of view of nutrition, the purpose of heating is to make fish balls mature, and the nutrition is denatured and decomposed, which is beneficial to human absorption. When fish balls are put into the pot, they will shrink immediately after being heated, so the nutrients inside will not be easily lost to the soup. When making fish balls, if the soup pot is boiled, add a little cold water in time to prevent the water from boiling. After all the fish balls are put down and surfaced, they can be fished out and put into cold water, which can be used for cooking. The above method can also be used to make meatballs made from other raw materials.
The main purpose of fried meatballs is to grasp the temperature of the oil pan, but also pay attention to the color of frying oil and the color of meatballs themselves. The temperature and color of meatball dishes need the conscious control of the chef. For example, after octopus is processed into meatballs, the color of dishes can be changed by changing cooking methods.
Although meatball dishes have changed a lot, once the secret of their making is mastered, more and better meatball dishes can be created through analogy.