I stumbled over Egg Foo Young the other day when investigating a Taste of Home post offering ’85 Brand New Dinners’. I immediately offered you my take on three of the dishes I personally found most enticing, easy and enjoyable. And I promised you further bites from the big buffet. So…
Louisa Chu’s ‘authentic’ Egg Foo Young: Like her aunt and
uncle made at their Chicago Chop Suey house…
Which brings me to the one recipe I – at least initially – found out of place in the ToH collection: Egg Foo Young.
A bad rap
The so-called ‘Chinese Omelet’ is a staple of the North American Chinese (Cantonese) restaurant menu. And it’s been enjoyed by lovers and castigated by haters for well over a hundred years.
The haters are more concerned about its ‘questionable authenticity’ than they are about its crunchy veggies and umamiful mushroom gravy. Is Egg Foo Young (EFY) actually Chinese? They’ll debate the issue until the water buffalo (Asian equivalent of cows) come home.
They claim EFY was invented in San Francisco (or LA or Vancouver) by Chinese immigrants who came to help build the railways in the second half of the 19th century and left a legacy of Asian restaurants in their wake as they pushed the west-to-east half of the line toward Promontory Point, Utah, and its connection with the eastern half.
Common knowledge has it that the Chinese workers and their families were at first perplexed to discover that many of the foods they were accustomed to back home were not available in America. So they made do. Among their early accommodations was the culturing of Bean Sprouts. Napa Cabbage was eventually established as a California standard to step in for Asian cabbage. And so on.
EFY has long been pooh-poohed because it features Bean Sprouts. It was an easy jump from there to claiming the dish was just another ersatz North American Chinese dish like Beef and Broccoli, Egg Rolls, Chop Suey and Orange Chicken.
Genuine Chinese Roots
However… In the same way that Orange Chicken (invented by Panda Express about 10 years ago) is an adaptation of a real Asian classic, General Tso’s Chicken, EFY is a close cousin of a traditional southern Chinese dish – as Louisa Chu explains in her 2018 Chicago Tribune article:
“The egg foo young origin story is said to go back to the southern Chinese coastal province of Guangdong, formerly known as Canton. The dish can now be found as a Cantonese hybrid not only in this country, but across Asia too. […] But the reputation of the Chinese-American restaurant dish has been unjustly smeared with poorly made gravy, often nothing more than a cornstarch-thickened, soy sauce-colored nightmare.”
Chu should know. She spent much of her youth at the Chinese Pagoda, the chop suey restaurant on the Northwest Side of Chicago owned by her aunt and uncle:
“The last wok on the end of the fiery line in the kitchen was reserved exclusively for making the deep-fried delicacies. At a glance, I could always tell who’d made the order — my grandmother’s were my favorites for their endearingly irregular form. […] Well into her 70s, she’d heat the oil nearly filling the enormous blackened wok, before lowering a scoop filled with ingredients bound by eggs and bean sprouts. Forged by ferociously bubbling fat, a golden puff emerged. Before rushing the dish to a waiting table, I’d ladle on gravy.”
The secret’s in the sauce
Or, the gravy, really. As Chu mentions above, the crowing glory of proper EFY is the mushroom gravy made from Shiitakes, the white parts of spring onions, soy sauce and vegetable stock. And she shares her (updated) family recipe in the article.
Another secret is the proper frying technique. She stresses deep frying is the classic method, ensuring the almost instant cooking of the omelet and a good puff-up. You can pan fry your EFY, but she suggests a good pour of peanut or vegetable oil and shallow frying to achieve that highly desirable puff.
Serve over classic steamed rice with gravy on top or on the side. Sprinkle with chopped scallions and toasted sesame seeds.
A meal in itself
If you make it with lots of additions and just enough egg to bind the omelet together securely, your EFY constitutes a meal in itself. And remember that recent reserch confirms that an egg a day may help keep cardiovascular disease away!
~ Maggie J.