Salted Fish and Flatbread 咸鱼饼子

How it is made

The dried fish goes into an iron pan with oil and is fried until the outside is crisp and the inside tender. In a 2025 column on the Yantai news site Shuimu (水母网), Cui Qichang (崔启昌) writes that people in Jiaodong (胶东) prefer Spanish mackerel (鲅鱼) for salted fish. The old dry method splits the belly, cleans out the guts and blood, wipes the fish dry and rubs salt in until the brine works through the whole body. The fish are then packed into vats or spread on reed mats.

A newer method, "soup curing" (汤腌), starts in late autumn with mackerel of over a kilogram. They are first salted in a vat until the brine has drawn out about 30 per cent of their water. Then they are moved into a porcelain vat of thick, salty "old brine" rich in fish oil and pressed under bamboo slats for a year and three months. By then the flesh is soft, slightly red and comes away from the bone; it tastes salty, savoury, fragrant and pungent.

Where it comes from

Cui writes that in the 1960s and 1970s and earlier, fresh fish was scarce in Jiaodong, and fishermen poured salt layer by layer into the hold after hauling in their nets. Salted fish began as a food the poor ate to make a meal go down. Dishes made from it have since moved from the family table to formal banquets.

How it is eaten

A Jiaodong saying runs "玉米饼子咸鲅鱼，人人吃了都佩服" ("corn cakes and salted mackerel win over everyone who eats them"). Cui names the coarse-grain corn cake, soft and crisp at once, as the best partner for steamed or fried soup-cured fish. For guests, families make a pot of soup-cured mackerel: pieces are soaked to take out some salt, then stewed with small fresh sea fish, scallion, ginger, Sichuan peppercorns, small chillies and peanut oil. Small round corn cakes are stuck on the rim of the pot, half above the liquid and half in it. The upper half forms a crisp crust while the lower half soaks up the broth.