These Curry Fish Balls are Hong Kong’s #1 Street Food

[machine whirring]

[machine whirring]

So clean.

Yummy.

Welcome to Tak Hing Yu Dan, Tak Hing fish ball company,

where chef makes fresh fish balls every single day,

which is hard to find in Hong Kong these days

and he's about to start the process.

So let's see how he's doing it.

[speaking in foreign language]

[speaking in foreign language]

Fish balls traditionally

are kind of a way to preserve the fish

because fish ball is an economic sort of food.

It's always usually some type of fish

that people are not going to eat whole.

These days it's mostly yellow belly croaker,

nice and silvery and quite small

like it's no bigger than like the span of your hand really.

This fish is caught very, very fresh.

You can see by the cleanliness of the gills,

the brightness of the eyes,

how it's shiny and not slimy.

Just because this fish doesn't sell

for as much per piece

doesn't mean that the quality and the freshness of the fish

is not there.

Good ingredients make good food.

This is the first step.

Chef really insists on making this fish ball from scratch

largely by hand.

What's important about doing it by hand

isn't just for some moral superiority,

it's about control of the product.

Step two, [speaking in foreign language]

This machine is specifically made

for the production of ground fish.

This is a different type of fish.

This is yellow pike conger.

It's a salt water fish.

Chef is lying it flat on this rotating

perforated surface.

A hydraulic press presses the fish through those holes

so that on the bottom you get clean fish meat

and if you come around on the other side

as it exits the press,

this arm is then pressing and smoothing out the fish

onto this little cutter here

so that as it's being raised,

it comes out with a little bit of those pin bones

still attached to the skin of the eel,

but all of the flesh extracted for fish wall production.

This becomes the second bestseller here,

which is fried fish skin with bones.

What people see as waste is texture, it's flavor.

I remember vividly the first time

I had fish skin with bones in it, changed my life.

I've eaten fried fish skin my whole life as a Hong Konger,

but the first time with bones on it,

it just becomes a whole different thing.

So these types of fish, they come from Southeast Asia

where it's a little bit warmer.

These are not fished in the harbors of Hong Kong.

Dude, so fast.

So fast.

So clean.

That's so cool.

First cut, filleting the fish to expose the spine.

Second cut, he's removing that spine

but keeping the bones that come off of it attached.

He's keeping all of those bones that come off the spine

because he wants to get that crispy skin later.

Dude, look just, what the heck?

So clean, so fast.

This is a huge fish.

[machine whirring]

Cool.

So cool.

The rest of this is gonna get portioned out

and then straight to the machine.

The two fishes do different things.

Chef says the eel gives it a little bit more

smoothness and body.

That's because of the fat percentage being higher in eel

than in the croaker.

Where the croaker is going to give you that

fresh fish flavor.

Croaker is also going to provide that gelatinous texture.

You can really see the buoyancy of this fish

as compared to the heel,

whereas the other fish provides more of that smoothness.

After the fish comes out of the grinder,

it's minced into a finer grind size

and then it goes inside of the mixer with the bag of ice

so that it finally becomes

that fine smooth fish ball texture.

Ice reduces the temperature.

In Hong Kong when it's really, really hot,

you don't want your fish to get too hot

because it'll go bad.

But more importantly,

what that ice does is prevents the fish from being cooked.

As it's being beaten,

the friction that's being created by that paddle,

by that mixing will heat up the fish.

Fish is so delicate

that it'll cook at like 40 degrees Celsius.

Imagine when you're making a custard with eggs

and you don't temper the eggs properly

and it breaks apart and it scrambles

even if you were to emulsify it,

even if you were to like blend it more to get it smooth

and you could add things to it so that it's settled,

it still has a little bit of that grittiness.

You want to prevent that grittiness.

[machine whirring]

Oh, it's quite fast.

That water from that ice melting

is going to provide a little bit of smoothness and texture.

The fish is being pressed up against each other

to start building that myosin,

a very specific type of protein

that maintains the moisture inside of beaten meat products.

Like really smooth meatballs or fish balls or sausages

have that kind of bounce and snap

because of this extraction of this myosin.

It also protects and holds the protein with the fat

so that everything's about layering air in between

so that it can bounce.

That's springiness.

That's where the texture comes from.

That's the smoothness and that's the retention of moisture

as it's being cooked.

Today they're processing about 265 pounds of fish,

all of which has gone into here.

The fish itself, because it's a salt water fish,

it has solidity, it has saltiness,

but to accentuate it and give yourself a little bit

of a larger margin of error,

a little bit of white pepper to get rid of any traces of,

he gave me this, as well as a little bit of potato starch.

For 260 pound-ish, he put in maybe two cups,

two and a half cups.

It's a tiny amount of starch.

After a couple of minutes of beating,

you can see the air and you can see the lightness,

the bounciness and the springiness being developed.

This gets beaten for 30 minutes.

This is where you screw it up.

I've made fish balls before

for all sorts of events and restaurants and it's hard to do.

Super nice and smooth.

You get a little bit of that gloss.

It's cohesive, it's one mass.

[speaking in foreign language]

It goes into the machine.

[machine whirring]

Oh, I see, okay.

The fish is getting piped basically

into these little consistent balls.

This is warm water.

You have to get rid of some of that cold iciness

and the warm water helps set the fish ball

just a little bit.

It's not cooking it,

but it's starting the protein denaturing process.

I mean it's so satisfying.

This is like internet level comfort brain stuff.

[machine whirring] I guess it's a little bit like a poach.

You're maintaining it a relatively low

but still warm temperature

so that that fish ball can set and shake right?

There must be thousands and thousands every day.

So nice, so consistent.

I think two primary types of fish balls in Hong Kong.

The first are fried.

Piped individually, it get set in warm water

and they get deep-fried

so that that frying seals in the fish ball.

Different textural experience.

Second type of fish ball in Hong Kong are the unfried types

and they're usually purchased in a tray like this

where the fish, after it's being beaten,

gets squeezed through chef's hands

and with a soup spoon remarkably consistent,

laying them out a little bit like a honeycomb one by one,

that fish ball, it'll get set in warm water

and then sold to markets as one large piece.

I've eaten this my whole life.

Seeing it made in action,

you really forget that there's a human being behind this,

not just the machine.

This is the fish skin.

It's a huge wok of oil.

It looks like they're frying pretty hot,

maybe 375 Fahrenheit.

It's a dry batter.

There's no wet ingredients added.

This is the standard issued fish skin

that you'll get at fish ball shops,

noodle shops all over Hong Kong.

The bone in kind, that's much, much harder to find.

Usually only places that make their own fish balls

will have them.

After the skin comes out of the fryer

and is drained off,

chef puts it in front of a fan just to cool down.

Despite how alluring it is

when it first comes out of the fryer.

It's only crispy after it's fully cool

and once it's cool, boss is going to put it into bags

to sell to customers

and they're primarily producing fish balls

and fish cakes for people to buy to take home.

But if you wanted to eat it here,

you can get it in the storefront.

They make it as a little snack.

Classic Hong Kong street style fish balls

with your choice of sauce.

So the fish skin, the bone-in ones, the fried fish balls,

this is the primary snack,

this is [speaking in foreign language]

so fish cake cut into the triangles

and then, yu bing, which is the whole cake.

And it's all the same batter.

Different shapes, but different shapes mean

different surface areas.

Different surface areas mean different textures.

It's time, I'm hungry.

Let's get some fish balls.

[speaking in foreign language]

[speaking in foreign language]

[speaking in foreign language]

Curry fish balls.

Tiny little cup, just a snack.

Best way to eat this at home is in a noodle with broth,

which that you can buy here or like hot pot or something.

But this is the way that Hong Kong people

like to have it as a snack.

Yummy.

The sauce, standard issue,

kind of like mild Hong Kong style curry.

A little bit of like coconut flavor,

but the fish ball itself is the main highlight.

I would eat this even without the sauce,

so I'm going to get another one.

This is actually just a fish ball, minimal seasoning.

Earlier, chef said The perfect fish ball is three things.

[speaking in foreign language] means springy.

[speaking in foreign language] means smooth,

[speaking in foreign language]

has plenty of fresh fish flavor.

And when you eat it without any sauce on it,

you can feel the waves of that fish flavor coming through.

The only seasoning for a little bit of like peakened sea,

a little bit of spice is the white pepper

and the bounce on that fish ball is outstanding.

When you bite into it,

so consistent uniform, nice and smooth.

Fish balls are kind of commodities in Hong Kong

and as Hong Kong people take it for granted.

But when it's really special

is when it's made by detail oriented craftsmanship.

Oy.

Yum.

So good.

I could eat these all day.

I really want to try those bone-in fish skins.

This bag goes for 40 HKD, which is about five US dollars.

That's kind of expensive, dude.

The fish ball's also 10 Hong Kong dollars for three.

That's kind of expensive,

but what you're paying for is the craftsmanship.

More important you're paying for fresh fish.

Look at this.

Just gorgeous artistic curl and see that texture.

So this is the skin of the conger eel, the back half of it.

You see all that spine, those are the thicker ones here

and the really thin ones in between will be the pin bones.

This is going to be a thicker crunch

on top of the crisp of the skin side.

[fish skin crunching]

Still warm.

So good.

This is the best thing here.

You don't get this type of perfectly imperfect texture

all the time.

So that was Tak Hang Yu Dan.

One way to eat this food is out of nostalgia.

A better way to eat this food

is out of just respect for the craft.

This is what I like about Hong Kong.

Even the simplest things, when you go to the right place,

you can really see what it's really supposed to be.

What a proper fish ball is like,

it's quintessential Hong Kong.