Rock Sugar Braised Soft-Shell Turtle 冰糖甲鱼

Rock Sugar Braised Soft-Shell Turtle (冰糖甲鱼) is soft-shell turtle cooked with rock sugar, a traditional signature dish of Ningbo (宁波), Zhejiang. It also goes by the name 'Duzhan Aotou' (独占鳌头), an idiom for taking first place, literally 'standing alone on the head of the giant turtle'. A CCTV food programme uses the same phrase to say the dish comes first among Ningbo dishes.

Flavour and texture

CCTV describes the finished dish as glossy red, sweet when it first reaches the tongue and salty in the finish, and calls it fresh-tasting and rich. A 2018 Zhejiang Online report on changing Ningbo tastes says that by present-day standards the traditional dish is too high in calories and too rich.

How it is made

Chen Jibo (陈继波) is executive chef of the Shipu Hotel (石浦大酒店) and a second-generation representative inheritor of the Zhuangyuanlou (状元楼) Ningbo-cuisine cooking technique, a provincial intangible cultural heritage item. He told Zhejiang Online that cooks now borrow from Cantonese cooking and add chicken and pork ribs to the rock-sugar turtle to broaden its flavour, or follow Yunnan practice and make a lighter, savoury turtle in a steam pot (汽锅) instead.

Where it comes from

Rock Sugar Braised Soft-Shell Turtle heads the list of Ningbo's ten famous dishes (宁波十大名菜) given in Chinese Wikipedia, alongside tiger-skin duck, steamed river eel and yellow croaker fried in seaweed batter. These ten dishes are the signature menu of Zhuangyuanlou, a long-established restaurant known for traditional Ningbo cooking, where rock-sugar turtle is one of the house specialities.