Lo hei!

February 5, 2024 11:05 PM

Celebrate Chinese New Year in Nanyang style with a delicious raw veggie and fish (smoked salmon can be used) salad that will bring you good luck and prosperity for the year ahead. How to Lo Hei instructions for the newbies for the Singapore (alright fine, Malaysia too) tradition also called yusheng.
posted by dorothyisunderwood (6 comments total)

Brought to you by the big serving I just had after the office meeting and my looking forward to doing yusheng with my oldest daughter hosting for the first time and showing my granddaughter how to toss up into the sky.
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 11:06 PM on February 5 [4 favorites]

The most memorable meal I had while visiting Singapore was at a restaurant during Chinese New Year where they offered a Chinese 10 course banquet meal on a per-person basis.

I ordered the banquet for 1 person... me. The opening dish was yusheng. The waitress came to the table and rapidly and efficiently recited the 11 blessings in mandarin while adding the 11 ingredients that represented them. Amazing!
posted by xdvesper at 3:14 AM on February 6 [2 favorites]

Huat ah!
posted by destrius at 4:31 AM on February 6

Oh yeah, this is going on the dinner menu.
posted by slogger at 7:39 AM on February 6

Yeah, the Guandong variant sounds a lot more simplified, just broth-steamed fish. Chinese Cooking Demystified mention (link to recipe in the comments)
posted by SoundInhabitant at 9:41 AM on February 6

So, a lo hei story. About 20 years ago, I was an undergrad studying in Pittsburgh. We had a Singapore Students' Association in college, and every year we would have a big Chinese New Year dinner, held in the lobby of one of the buildings on campus. I can't remember exactly how many tables we had, probably around 10ish tables with 10 persons each (round tables, as per custom). Most people attending were Singaporean students, with non-Singaporean friends as well. For food we would have "steamboat", which is basically a hot pot with stuff like sliced meats, fishballs, vegetables and so on. The soup stock was a single Knorr chicken bullion cube, as we were poor college kids with not much money to do anything fancy. We got all the ingredients from an Asian grocery stall in the Strip District, and for prep all we needed to do was chop up the vegetables; everything else was more or less served in the packaging it came in, for guests to cook at the table.

We did want to do yusheng though, and that was something that couldn't be bought ready-made. So every year, the most time consuming task was shredding huge amounts of daikon radish and carrots. To colour and preserve the daikon, we left it soaking in sugar syrup and food colouring. I think we used these big containers we got from Office Depot or Ikea.

And as for the raw fish, that would be the most expensive ingredient in yusheng. As I said, we were poor college kids, so there was no way we could get sashimi-grade salmon from some expensive Japanese grocery store. Instead, we bought large fillets of salmon from Costco, froze them, and sliced them using a mandolin. Then to keep things "fresh", we put the fish in a Coleman cooler box with ice, and left the box outside, burying it in the snow to keep it cold.

I'm not sure how many food safety regulations we violated every year, and its amazing nobody got food poisoning. But every February, when Pittsburgh was in the deep of winter, with freezing winds and dirty grey snow piled up on the sidewalks, when the hot and humid tropical island we came from felt the farthest away it could ever be, we would lo hei, shouting out the blessings, and over a bowl of warm soup feel a little more at home.
posted by destrius at 9:26 PM on February 6 [2 favorites]