Shrimp Egg Foo Young & Perfect Egg Foo Young Gravy! | The Woks of Life

Hi folks, today I'm going to show you how to make shrimp egg for young, the Chinese restaurant classic that is basically a shrimp omelette. A Chinese omelette consisting of three patties and pancakes, if you will. Today, I'm going to show you how to make shrimp egg for young, a Chinese restaurant classic that is basically a shrimp omelette, a Chinese omelette consisting of three patties and pancakes, if you will, with a nice savory gravy over the top. I remember, actually, in my Chinese restaurant days, I absolutely dreaded making shrimp egg for young. I said, how is it going to stick together? I'm going to pour it into the oil. My father, he coached me. He says, look, crack the eggs at the last minute, just about, and mix everything, and then everything will stay together. If you leave that on the stove or on the side too long, it warms up and everything gets watery. So there's a few tricks, and today I'm going to go over all those for you. For a good shrimp egg for young, you need a tasty gravy. The gravy, you could almost say, makes that egg for young. You get that fried egg for young. It's nice and crispy out of the pan or out of the fryer, and then you pour that gravy on there. You douse a few chopped scallions on there. Perfection. So gravy, it can be a controversial subject, and today what I'm going to show you is how to make a gravy that really doesn't fall apart. It's a roux-based gravy, so that is also incorporates cornstarch. So you get the best of both worlds. You're not going to get a gravy that's going to gelatinize and solidify, and that's what the cornstarch does, but a pure cornstarch gravy, you know, the next day will get all watery, it'll break down, and you might have to heat it up and add more cornstarch. So the flour and the gravy together helps keep everything together and makes a nice solid gravy, and I'll tell you exactly what kind of spices that makes an egg for young gravy. All right, so we're going to get to making the shrimp egg for young, which consists of, by the way, some onion, chopped onion, some mung bean sprouts, fresh mung bean sprouts, six eggs, one egg for each patty, about 10 ounces of shrimp, raw shrimp, and it can be any size. We have today, I think these are 30 size shrimp, which means they're 30 to a pound, but we've actually gone ahead and shelled everything, and we're going to chop these and velvet these, which is a very important step, and we also have a little cornstarch here, which is a little bit of a cheat that helps keep those patties together. My father always used to say, hey, if you're unsure about it, you know, add a little bit of cornstarch, and it'll keep the patty together better. That's mostly if you're a little bit slow at what you do or what have you, because you're supposed to mix and then put it right in while everything is cohesive, so you don't want that batter to get watery. What we're going to do is start velveting the shrimp, so let me put these shrimp, about 10 ounces of shrimp, and you want to chop these. I want to chop these roughly so that they'll be able to cook in the batter, in the eggs for young while they're frying, but you don't want to mince them or anything, you get them too small, because you want to actually eat nice chunks of shrimp in your patty, and we're going to transfer these to a bowl. We're going to lightly velvet these with a little bit of sugar, salt, and cornstarch. Quarter teaspoon of sugar in here, eighth of a teaspoon to a quarter teaspoon of salt here, and then we're going to mix it all. You can use chopstick, I'm just going to use my hands, and then you're going to set this aside, and that's your velveted shrimp, makes it nice and moist and tasty. So gravy is super important to the egg for young, and this gravy, we have some all-purpose flour, we're going to make a roux to keep it nice and solid, and we have a little fresh garlic, and I used a little bit of red onion, you want shallot, but if you don't have a shallot, you could use red onion. We've got a little bit of turmeric and paprika, got a little white pepper, we've got a mixture here, and notice everything is prepared for when we go over to the stove. We've got soy sauce, dark soy sauce, regular soy sauce, a little oyster sauce, and sesame oil in here, and then I've got this mixture of about a quarter cup of chicken stock and a quarter cup of cornstarch, and this is really going to thicken it, and the combination of the cornstarch and the flour is going to make a really versatile, tasty gravy. It's not going to chunk up and get gelatinized, but it's not also not going to thin out, that's why we use both, and of course, a low sodium chicken stock, and you can use a regular chicken stock, but I tell everybody, you follow the directions of the recipe, but taste it. It's a little too salty, you add a little bit more chicken stock or water. If it's not tasty, if it's not salty enough, if you feel like it needs more seasoning, choose any of these seasonings that are in the recipe, soy sauce, oyster sauce, dark soy, it's not dark enough, add a little more dark soy. You like it a little bit spicier, add a little bit of white pepper, anything, just use the ingredients here and make it your own. Some people like low sodium, have a low sodium diet, they like less salt, some people like it super tasty, like me, I like a strong tasting gravy, and it's going to really complement the egg plium patties, because the egg plium patties essentially don't really have a lot of seasoning in them, if any, just in the shrimp when we belved it in. So, off to the stove, we'll do the gravy now. All right, we're going to do maybe our gravy in the wok here, we've got all our ingredients handy here, very important, and I'm just going to put two tablespoons of vegetable oil or peanut oil, if you got it even. I'm going to use a whisk, this is going to make a little roux here, all-purpose flour. For those of you who don't know what a roux is, it's just basically a little bit of flour and some oil or butter, a lot of times, so we're using oil, and just cook this, cook the rawness out of it, and this is going to help thicken our gravy. I have it on about like a low medium heat, low to medium heat, and what I like to do is cook the roux a little bit until it gets a little color as well, and then add my garlic because I don't want it to burn the garlic in the shallot. So, basically, this is hot oil in flour, it just fries everything in there nicely, and I'm going to add the paprika and turmeric, stir that in, and then stir in the chicken stock. Now, at this point, you can turn this up a little bit higher. I use low medium heat because we don't actually want to make sure we don't burn the aromatics or burn the spices, otherwise, you're going to get a bitter taste to it. I'm going to add the soy sauce mixture, make sure you get every bit, and add the white pepper at this point. Use my whisk and whisk it in. You see that nice rich color that it adds, especially the dark soy sauce, which is why it's key. Now, my cornstarch has settled, and you see how thick this is, and you don't want to pour it in that way. You want to definitely thin it, liquefy it again into a slurry. Right now, it's a paste, but you don't have to add it all. Sometimes, people are a little bit slower, they walk, it's boiling, they leave it going so there's less liquid, and maybe they need less slurry. Now, I'm just going to drizzle this in as I'm stirring it. I'll probably put maybe two thirds of it in as I'm stirring vigorously so you don't get any chunks. Now, it's starting to thicken, and it really helps to thicken it already. Now, you look at this, and you see that it looks kind of nice, actually, the consistency. I've used about three quarters of it, but it's a little thin, actually. I'm just going to go ahead and add the rest of this in. There you go. Now, it coats your spatula, coats your spoon nicely. That's it. Hit the mark on that one. Okay. Now, we're ready to assemble our batter for the egg foo young. I like using this stainless steel bowl because you're going to be mixing it, and then you're going to be scraping that and frying it into the oil or pan, whichever we're using. And what's important is that you want to assemble the ingredients, meaning put the ingredients in the bowl, including the bean sprouts, the onions, and your eggs, and shrimp, and your little cheat, your little bit of cornstarch slurry, but don't mix it because you still have to wait for the oil to heat up. You got to wait for your pan to heat up, and you don't want this batter to be sitting around all mixed because it'll get watery very quickly, and the eggs will warm up, and then you're going to have like a little bit more challenging batter, I would say, to work with. And that's what we used to do at the restaurant. We used to get everything, all the eggs cracked in there in a little pot. We actually used a little aluminum pot because it was three patties per order, and we'd have it ready, and I would put the onions in, go to the prep table, put the whatever meat, in this case it's shrimp, put it all in together, crack the eggs in there, and I'd put it right in front on next, on the next line, on deck for cooking. And then my father, whoever's at the wok is ready to cook, they would have their ladle, and they'd take it, and once they get the oil all ready and ready to fry, they would start mixing it, and it would go right in. So basically there's almost zero time where the batter sits. It's mixed, it goes right in the oil, and that's how you get a good solid egg foo young, very easy to cook. So we're going to assemble everything, make sure just about right before we're ready to fry the patties, that's when we're going to mix. Got that? Let's go. All right, so we're going to assemble this egg foo young, put in all the chopped onions, bean sprouts, drain, not too watery, and we've got our velveted shrimp. Use this spatula here, okay, very nice, and we're going to use our little cheat here, I'm just going to stir it up a little bit, I'm going to start stirring, put it all over here like that, all right, and then six eggs, nice yolks, very nice yolks. Chickens are laying very well, and these eggs are right out of the refrigerator. All right, you want to keep them cool, you don't want when the eggs are cool, the whites are nice and thick and hold everything together. You're going to start cooking right after you mix it. You don't want this to set mixed together because once everything is mixed together, it starts to get all watery. Here we go. So we've got the oil heated to about 350 degrees Fahrenheit, give or take, and now is when we're going to mix. So the way you mix this, we've got six eggs, we've got all our ingredients, the way you mix this is kind of like a little folding, a gentle folding. See what's going on here, a little gentle folding, you don't want to overmix. Overmix is bad, okay. You just want to make sure that you're getting everything together and everything pretty uniform because you're going to get six patties out of it, and this looks just about pretty good, and the only thing that you have to worry about here is that you get an even distribution of shrimp, so you don't get somebody the lucky guy who gets all the shrimp. Take one ladle full, okay, don't worry about it, just some bean sprouts are sticking out, okay, and then right on the edge here, place it down, kind of hold it there until it starts to fry and solidify, and there you have it, okay, and what I do is I just push this off, let it float, and now we're going to go get the next one, and do the same thing. You're basically holding this in place while it's getting set, okay, and it's okay to kind of guide stuff back in that's sort of floating off onto the wet material, and that's okay to do that, and now, by now, my temperature is probably going down, so I have to adjust it, adjust the flame a little bit higher, okay, now I've got to go back, get another scoop bowl, all right, of course, you want to avoid the other patties, you don't want to get too close, you don't want them to stick together, there you go, this one just float up, see what I'm going to do, I'm going to put these spring greens back onto the wet stuff, and they'll stick together, okay, so now I've got that going, I'm going to get a wok spatula here, I'm going to pile some oil on top of here, and you can tell which one we put in first, right here, you put in first, just about ready to flip, and flip it, you can see the shrimp is cooking nicely, I'm going to do that, look how that beautiful golden brown that is, this was the third one that we did right here, so this one is the second one, we're ready to flip that, I'm just going to tip it over the side, and a gentle, a gentle flip, I'm going to flip this one now, there you go, beautiful golden brown, now what I'm going to do is I'm going to show you how to take these out, now there's a couple ways you can take them out, we used to take them out, you know, on a spatula, pile them on top, but if you have, use this handy spider here, and you can pile them, if I pile one, pile another one on top, and the reason why we pile them on top actually is because we used to serve them in a stack, so you can do that, I'm going to squeeze a little bit of that oil out, okay, and these are ready to plate, so I can put them over here and let them drip a little bit longer, and I'm going to go get my serving plate, and it's up to you, you can, you can, you can plate these on top of each other in a round plate, or you can do what I'm doing here with an oval plate, and put them just like that, and of course you can arrange them however you like, but we're going to put these aside and get ready to serve these with the gravy on top, scallions and rice, nice thing about cooking in a pot is that you can put the cover on the pot, and then you have no oil smell, we could actually do that right now, no oil smell, all right, so I'm going to show you on this, on the pan, and since I'm showing you here, I'm going to use the, you use fresh oil, I'm going to use some more oil from the wok, okay, and you can see here, this has been sitting a while, and it's starting to get a little bit watery, you see that, how that happens, but I want to make sure you get a nice hot pan, see, okay, the oil is starting to dampen a little bit, so we're going to, I'm going to try, and here's another, here's another trick on here, where you can leave some of the liquid in there, okay, and leave some of the egg and the liquid in here, pan fry it, fold it, fold it in, okay, you could use a spatula, fold it in, you adjust the heat, you don't want it too hot now, now it's set, and actually I could use a little bit of this egg liquid, if you feel like you don't have enough, you can just put it on top now, and start to set, that non-stick pan is nice, you can get it moving around, and here you're just going to flip this, like you do an omelet, and you want to lower the temperature a little bit, after it sets, you want to lower the temperature, you don't want to scorch your egg either, and obviously it takes a little bit longer to cook, because it's not in, it's not a deep fryer, so when do you flip the pancakes, that's always important, but when you start to see some of the egg cooking here, getting the shrimp, I would flip it now, get some of that steam cooking the shrimp, there you go, so eggs were young in the pan, it absorbs a lot less oil, you know what I always say, it's the difference between fried chicken and baked chicken, you want your deep fried egg for young, or you want your hand fried, a little bit less oil, which ones taste better, you can be the judge, but I'll go deep fried every time, you like this better, well it's certainly a lot less, a lot less trouble, you know, over here we have this deep fried oil to contend with, and you can reuse this oil, like we're doing here, we use this oil, you could use this for stir frying, you use it for frying other stuff, every drop of that egg, fold it over a little bit, make it into a patty, okay, let these things cook, now we cooked one patty first to show you, but it could have just as easily just made all three patties in here, fried egg for young birds, hand fried, all right, I'm gonna flip these, look at that, nice, tuck all that goodness in there, let this cook for another two minutes or so, turn down the heat, looks like it's a little bit high, heat up the gravy here, stir it up, you know, in the restaurant we used to put a lot more oil in the gravy, and all the oil would come up to the top, so the skin wouldn't form, and we'd tell the servers, the waitresses back then, we had all waitresses and busboys back in the day, we would tell them, stir the gravy before you put the gravy over, so what would happen is, we'd cook the order of eggs for young, we'd put the patties, plate the patties, and then the gravy would be in the steam table, and then as soon as the waitress was ready to pick up, she would still have the hot eggs for young patties, but then she'd have fresh hot gravy that she would get from the steam table, pour it over the top, throw on the scallion, and serve it right away, that's the way to do it, and that's what we're gonna do right here, so I'm stirring this gravy, you see that, the skin that formed, I'm just stirring it right in, it's okay, no big deal, you see that this, that using the flour, it maintains its thickness, I think these are done, pan-fried, homemade, shrimp egg for young, all right, so here we go, I like a lot of gravy, and you can serve some gravy also on the table, we'll get some scallions here, get a lot of scallions, because the scallions are nice and fresh, it cuts through the thickness of the richness of the gravy, and the egg for young patty, let's go, all right, I'm ready to dig in, nice, shrimp, our gravy, and these eggs, it's egg for young patty, so fluffy, shrimp is perfectly cooked, you get a little nice blast of contrast of freshness with the scallion, it cuts through the richness of the gravy, and the egg for young patty, it's delightful, egg for young, got the shrimp bits in there, a little crunch of the bean sprouts, and the onions, very good, try to make this at home, now this is a restaurant style egg for young, now it gonna, I could, I could just imagine myself that if I was at a restaurant, I'd be tasting the same dish right now, now what we also did was a pan-fried version of egg for young, so good, and we're gonna try that next, yeah, and we have to set that up too, okay, this is our pan-fried egg for young, and we're gonna serve this home style, whoa, look at that, a good amount of scallion, green onion, really the combination of the green onion, it's a must, you must have, all right, so we've got restaurant style deep fried egg for young, and we've got pan-fried egg for young, I'm just gonna dig right in here, I know this is family style, but I'm just gonna dig right in here, that ain't too shabby from the pan, let's see how it tastes. Well I gotta say, it tastes pretty good, and no deep frying necessary, but if I was to contrast, these, this pan-fried egg for young is a little bit flatter, it's less airy, and more like an omelette than an egg for young. The egg for young patty, the fried egg for young patty that's in the restaurant style, the way restaurants do it, is higher, fluffier, you could see when it was done that it's fluffier, and it has a more deep fried, it's kind of like comparing, it's crunchy, it's crunchy, it's good, it's like comparing a french fry to like a baked potato, not quite, but I would say a fried french fry to a baked french fry, however you want to do it, you gotta make this dish at home, and if you're making, if you're doing deep frying, I might just do a batch of fried chicken wings for the super bowl. The egg for young, restaurant style for me. All right, I think that's a wrap, give me a fork. You try a difference, you tried it. Oh that's the uh pan-fried. Yeah. It's good right? Get a little bit of rice. Now try this. There's a nice chunk. Yeah.