CNY: How to Rehydrate and Clean Dried Sea Cucumber

Sea cucumber is one of my favourite delicacies during the Chinese New Year festive period. We would usually braise it with pork trotters for our CNY reunion dinner. 

You can either buy ready-to-use frozen sea cucumber or dried sea cucumber (which you have to soak to rehydrate and then clean it). This year, I got some dried sea cucumber (aka sandfish) from Sri Lanka; they grew 3x the dried size once they were done rehydrating. Remember that if you want to use dried sea cucumber, you should allow 6-7 days for it to fully rehydrate before it is ready to use in your favourite recipes. Once it is rehydrated, you can store them in the freezer and defrost whenever you need them. 

Here is the step-by-step video on how to rehydrate and clean dried sea cucumber:

Tools needed: Big pot for soaking and boiling the sea cucumber, scissors, and container for storing. 

𝐇𝐨𝐰 𝐭𝐨 𝐑𝐞𝐡𝐲𝐝𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐞 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐂𝐥𝐞𝐚𝐧 𝐃𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐝 𝐒𝐞𝐚 𝐂𝐮𝐜𝐮𝐦𝐛𝐞𝐫
1. Day 1: Rinse and soak sea cucumber in room temp water overnight.
2. Day 2: change the water. Bring the pot of water to the boil, once cooking cook for 1-2 mins. Turn off heat and leave aside to soak.
3. Day 3: change water, boil again as above. If u find that sea cucumber has become softer, use scissors to cut the stomach and clean the sand/intestines. After cleaning, boil again. Leave to soak.
4. Day 4: change water/ boil again as Step 2.
5. Day 5: place in container with water and put in fridge for 2 days. Keeping it refrigerated is the last step to soaking the sea cucumber and making it larger.
6. Day 7: ready to cook. Cut into smaller piece as desired and use in your favourite recipes.

Note: for any unused sea cucumber, place in container in water and freeze. Defrost when needed.

You can buy good quality dried sea cucumber here, this is the one I got: https://shope.ee/5pZf3782IF

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