Red-Braised Pufferfish 红烧河豚
Red-Braised Pufferfish is featured among the local specialties of Jiangsu.
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Red-Braised Pufferfish (红烧河豚) is pufferfish braised with soy sauce, one of the classic ways of cooking the fish in the Jiangsu and Zhejiang area. In Jiangsu it is a staple of Yangzhong (扬中), a city known as China's home of pufferfish (中国河豚之乡), where, a local pufferfish chef told Wenhui Bao, more pufferfish is red-braised than cooked any other way.
How it is made
Wenhui Bao (文汇报) described how the Yangzhong pufferfish chef Kong Qingpu (孔庆璞) makes the dish. He cuts the fish's liver into small pieces and fries them in moderately hot oil, stirring and pressing to squeeze out their water and fish oil. Fresh bamboo shoots go into the pot next, the cleaned pufferfish is laid on top, and a little cooking wine, soy sauce, spring onion and garlic are added. With the lid on, it braises for about forty minutes, the heat is turned from high to low and the sauce slowly reduces.
Cooking the liver in oil is the step Yangzhong cooks treat as their signature skill: in the oil it turns from milky white through shades of yellow to brown, and knowing when to ladle up the oil to cool it decides how good the fish tastes. People's Daily reports that the traditional Yangzhong dishes were rather greasy, and that local chefs have since stopped frying the fish's own fat for oil, cooking the liver with small-press soybean oil instead; they now also squeeze out the blood rather than soaking the fish.
Flavour and texture
The liver gives the braising juice its bright yellow colour and thick, fragrant body. The usual partners are spring greens from Yangzhong: bamboo shoots and yangcao (秧草), a soft, bright-green leaf also called caotou (草头). Both come into season just as the pufferfish reach the Yangzhong stretch of the river, and a Beijing Daily (北京日报) report calls pufferfish braised with the tender tips of caotou a classic that pairs fresh greens with smooth fish.
How it is eaten
At the end of the meal, people in Yangzhong stir plain rice into the leftover juice to make laofan (捞饭), which they enjoy most of all. The best time is around the Qingming festival (清明), when the fish spawn and are at their fattest and most toxic. Because the Yangtze is now more strictly protected, the pufferfish served are farmed, and People's Daily notes that cooking pufferfish requires a licence.
Where it comes from
People's Daily writes that Yangzhong has eaten pufferfish for many centuries, and that red-braising and white soup were once the only two local methods. Yangzhong pufferfish food customs (扬中河豚食俗) entered the fourth batch of the Jiangsu provincial intangible cultural heritage list in January 2016, and by 2024 the city had run pufferfish food promotions for twenty years in a row.
Sources & reading
Written from the linked sources and checked sentence by sentence against quoted extracts by a separate reviewer on 2026-09-24. Recipes and servings vary between kitchens.