Sweet and Sour Fish and Vegetable Stir-fry (2023)

Today’s recipe, Sweet and Sour Fish and Vegetable Stir-fry is a quick and easy main dish. The star of today’s dish is the sauce. My sweet and sour sauce contains far less ingredients than most of the sweet and sour recipes you’ll find on the internet. It is even simpler than my Sweet and Sour Pork Meatballs recipe.

When I hear the word ‘Sweet & Sour’, I think of the dish, Sweet and Sour Pork (Subuta), which is a classic stir-fry dish from China. But today’s dish is a fish version of Sweet and Sour Pork, with light and plain sauce.

The sweet and sour sauce in today’s recipe is made with 5 pantry staples. I made the sauce less complex so that you can enjoy the delicate flavour of the fish.

If you are a vegetarian, you can substitute the fish with diced fried tofu or small tofu puffs. You can also omit protein and make it a vegetable stir-fry if you prefer.

What’s in my Sweet and Sour Fish and Vegetable Stir-fry

• Fish fillet
• Carrot
• Capsicum
• Onion
• Pearl oyster mushrooms
• Corn flour/cornstarch
• Oil to stir-fry

For this dish, I recommend using white flesh fish fillet. Since the fish pieces will be pan-fried, then mixed with vegetables, you also want to use fish fillets with a firm texture. I used swordfish today because I had an extra fillet in the fridge from when I made the Swordfish Teriyaki Recipe. But you can use other fish fillets with a sufficient thickness such as cod, flathead, and large snapper.

The mushrooms can be shiitake mushrooms or shimeji mushrooms.

Sweet and Sour Sauce

• Soy sauce
• Sugar
• Rice wine vinegar
• Ketchup
• Corn flour/cornstarch diluted in water to thicken the sauce

Today’s sweet and sour sauce is slightly different from the sauce in my Sweet and Sour Pork Meatballs recipe. I didn’t use chicken stock powder and sesame oil. The flavour of today’s sauce is plainer than a Chinese-style sweet and sour sauce.

How to Make Sweet and Sour Fish and Vegetable Stir-fry

The process of making Sweet and Sour Stir-fry dish is quite similar to most sweet and sour stir-fry recipes, even if the main ingredients are different and the sauces are slightly different. Prepare ingredients, cook protein ingredients, stir-fry everything, add sauce, and thicken the sauce. See the video.

1. Cut vegetables and fish fillet into bite-size pieces.
2. Boil carrot.
3. Mix the Sweet and Sour Sauce ingredients excluding corn flour/cornstarch diluted in water.
4. Dust the fish pieces in corn flour/corn starch.
5. Pan-fry the fish pieces.
6. Stir-fry vegetables, then add fish pieces.
7. Add the Sweet and Sour Sauce, mix, then stir in the corn flour/cornstarch diluted in water to thicken the sauce.

It is important not to cook the vegetables too much. You want to retain the crunchy texture of the vegetables – this gives you a sense of freshness. By pan-frying the fish coated in corn flour/cornstarch, each piece of fish does not break easily while being stir-fried.

Sweet and Sour Fish and Vegetable Stir-fry is a quick dish to cook. Pan-frying the fish takes only about 5 minutes and stir-frying takes a few minutes. So, it will take less than 10 minutes to cook Sweet and Sour Fish and Vegetable Stir-fry.

You can keep Sweet and Sour Fish and Vegetable Stir-fry in the fridge for a couple of days, and the flavour does not deteriorate. The only downside is that the capsicum pieces discolour and it becomes moss green colour, which is not as appetising as the bright green colour.

I like the clean and light flavour of the sweet and sour sauce. It is quite addictive.

Yumiko

Watch How To Make It