Air-Dried Eel 风鳗
Air-Dried Eel is featured among the local specialties of Zhejiang.
Air-Dried Eel (风鳗) is sea eel (海鳗) salted and hung in the winter wind in Zhoushan (舟山), Zhejiang. Zhejiang Online calls the steamed dish a fixture of Spring Festival tables in most Zhoushan households. When it is dried longer until the flesh is firm it becomes eel stockfish, manxiang (鳗鲞), and eel dried in the winter northwest-wind season is called 'new-wind eel stockfish' (新风鳗鲞).
How it is made
Sea eel is caught in quantity in winter, which is also the season of the northwest wind; December is when the fish are fattest. Chen Juncai, who dries eels on a plot beside the Yadanshan (鸭蛋山) ferry pier in Dinghai (定海), prefers fish of about one kilogram: larger ones do not take the brine evenly, smaller ones are too thin. He slits each eel, cleans out the guts, props the body open with short wooden sticks and soaks it in a brine he spends several days adjusting.
The best drying weather is an overcast day with a northwest wind, and in less than 24 hours the thick flesh is ready; a few more days make firmer manxiang. On a south-wind day he has to dry the fish with electric fans, and the flavour suffers. Another method given by Zhejiang Online rubs the split eel with salt and leaves it for two or three hours, spreads it with crossed bamboo strips and hangs it in shade, never in sun, for about seven days.
How it is eaten
The usual way is plain steaming: the dried eel is cut into pieces, laid with a few slices of ginger and steamed without other seasoning, then scattered with spring onion and dipped in soy sauce or rice vinegar. At the New Year's Eve dinner it appears as a plate of snow-white, tender flesh with a sweet, fresh taste. Good manxiang is glossy and translucent with oil. It is also cooked with pork belly, stir-fried and briefly braised with soy sauce, rice wine and sugar.
Where it comes from
Sea eel has a strong fishy smell when fresh, so Zhoushan people prefer to dry it. Chen Juncai says drying was a way to keep seafood before refrigerators, and that wind-dried eel is now a provincial-level intangible-heritage craft.
Sources & reading
Written from the linked sources and checked sentence by sentence against quoted extracts by a separate reviewer on 2026-09-25. Recipes and servings vary between kitchens.