Cantonese Shrimp and Eggs (滑蛋蝦仁) | The Woks of Life

Hey everyone, today we're gonna make a shrimp and egg stir fry. This is one of my all-time favorite Cantonese restaurant dishes, and it's actually really, really easy to make at home. And the trick that I'm excited to share with you guys today is around cornstarch. So if you've ever tried to make scrambled eggs, you might find that your results are really variable. So sometimes if you get the heat just right, it turns out perfect. Sometimes maybe you decide to add a splash of milk, that's a very popular trick. Personally, the thing that I turn to when I'm cooking scrambled eggs of any kind is cornstarch. Cornstarch dissolved in water really makes it such that scrambled eggs are just the right texture. They're cooked through, but they're tender. You don't get as much variability where sometimes they might be cooked, but really tough, or just have that kind of spongy texture. Instead, you get a really, really great silky texture to your eggs. I feel like it even maybe sticks a little bit less in your pan. Everything kind of is more cohesive. So in Chinese cooking, a few basic tenets for cooking eggs are high heat and a good amount of oil. So this is actually pretty different from what you might have heard from a Western philosophy around cooking scrambled eggs, which is very, very low heat and kind of coddling them in the pan and pushing them around gently and breaking up the curds, adding milk, dairy, all this other stuff. For these eggs, for great scrambled eggs in general, all you need is water and cornstarch. And today, this dish of Cantonese shrimp with scrambled eggs is a perfect way to showcase just how great this trick is because you get silky folds of scrambled egg and there's scallion dotted through it. And then you get the shrimp and you put that over rice and you could down two bowls of rice. I know a lot of you are sensitive about eating too much rice, but sometimes you just gotta do what you gotta do. To start making this dish, the first step is to velvet your shrimp. So I have some peeled and deveined shrimp here. I prefer to do myself the favor of getting the pre-peeled and deveined shrimp at the store. And then I've added some oil, salt, sugar, white pepper, and cornstarch to this, and it's just eight ounces of shrimp. And then you just set it aside while you're preparing the eggs. Super easy. And then we're gonna need one scallion, and then I'm gonna beat my eggs and I'm gonna show you exactly how the eggs come together with the cornstarch slurry and a few flavorings, namely white pepper and sesame oil. Very simple, very straightforward. There's also some salt. Yeah, I feel like this is one of those dishes where the more often you make it, the more comfortable you get with it. And then it starts to feel a lot easier. I personally have been on a scrambled egg journey, I feel like, for the past three years. Started in lockdown making my own breakfast and I was just like, I really wanna master scrambled eggs. I'll do my own horn a little bit and say that I think I have. So let's get started. So another key to great scrambled eggs is actually keeping the eggs relatively cold before you're ready to cook. So if you are gonna need some downtime between getting your eggs ready and doing other things for getting the meal on the table, I would recommend putting the eggs in the fridge and then doing the eggs like right when you're ready to go to the walk, or you can beat the eggs and then put them back in the fridge and then just give them a stir before you're ready to cook. So I'm gonna crack eight eggs into this bowl and these are our chicken eggs from our flock. And we recently actually got a bunch of new baby chickens. So the egg supply is in good standing. And let's see, that's five, six, seven, eight. All right, so we need an eighth of a teaspoon of white pepper. And then we need one teaspoon of sesame oil. I'm just gonna eyeball it. That's about one teaspoon. And then three quarter teaspoons of salt. There is some debate around when to salt your eggs and whether it's gonna harm the final product of your eggs, but I just salt my eggs and I've never had a problem. I'm also gonna take this time to mix up my cornstarch slurry. So usually my general rule is one teaspoon of cornstarch per four eggs. So if you're only doing two eggs, say for breakfast in the morning, you would do a half a teaspoon. And that's a ratio that's worked out really well for me. And I just dissolve each teaspoon of cornstarch in one tablespoon of water. So this cornstarch will settle, so you wanna make sure it's well stirred and then add it to the eggs right when you're ready to cook them. If for whatever reason you need to make this in advance or some random life emergency pops up and you need to put this in the fridge, just make sure to stir the mixture again because the cornstarch will also settle in the egg mixture. Now I'm gonna beat the eggs. This is very important. So you don't just mix the eggs slow, slowly and casually and lackadaisically. You really gotta beat these eggs because you wanna make sure that they're frothy and that big bubbles form and that's also gonna help add to getting a super light and silky texture with these eggs. And I start by just popping these yolks to break it up. And you just kinda wanna like lift the egg and get a really nice height on how you beat them. And that helps kind of generate those big bubbles that you can start to see coming up. And I find that that gives a really great texture to the finished product. And it's like 20 or 30 seconds, not too long, nothing crazy. As long as you're getting like big, big bubbles, you're good. So I would say that's all right. And the last thing I'm gonna do is just chop this scallion and then we're ready to go. And this doesn't have to be particularly artful. I'm just slicing them into thin rounds. And this just adds a really nice flavor dimension. Nobody was ever mad from a little extra scallion. And that's it, that's the prep. So once you've got the shrimp down, it's extremely easy. I'm gonna bring everything over to the wok and then we're gonna turn the wok on and get this going. Okay, so we're at the wok and for this dish, I'm gonna need four tablespoons of oil. I know it sounds like a lot. One tablespoon is for cooking the shrimp, pre-searing the shrimp, and then the remaining three tablespoons are for bringing the rest of the dish together. So again, like I said, that high heat plus a good amount of oil. So I'm gonna turn my wok on and we'll just wait until it's just smoking. So I'm just gonna turn the heat down a little bit to medium high now, now that it's smoking. I'm gonna add about one tablespoon of oil and we're gonna throw in the shrimp. Just spread that out in a single layer. And the key with this shrimp is we wanna take these off when they're still raw in the center because to get perfectly cooked shrimp, we're gonna add them back to the egg and then they're gonna finish cooking in the heat from the wok at that point. You don't want them to be brown. Yeah. All right, so like literally maybe five more seconds, 10 more seconds, and then I'm gonna take them off. All right, I'm just gonna put the shrimp back in the bowl that they marinated in. And shrimp just cooks so fast. You don't want them to be rubbery at all. All right, now the wok is on medium high heat, smoking pretty good. So I'm just gonna lower it just to buy me a little bit of time because I do need to stir up this cornstarch slurry and see that it did settle. Just gonna make sure that's all combined. Put that in. I'm just gonna mix it up. To the wok, I'm gonna add that remaining three tablespoons of oil. So one, two, three. And this is gonna happen pretty quick. So I'm gonna add my egg in. And you can see that it's immediately puffing up. And I'm just gonna gently push the egg around. And then as the egg on the perimeter cooks, I'm gonna kind of push it back to the center. And I'm not, I'm doing a little bit eager beaver here. So I'm just gonna let it set up a little bit more. So the goal is to not break up the egg a huge amount. You wanna kind of keep it into, in these like cohesive, like pillowy, silky layers that are forming here. And that's all just gonna be like, the shrimp are just gonna tuck in there. And I'm gonna add them back now, actually. So those are gonna cook in the residual heat. Just gonna add this egg in. And you kind of give it a stir fry. It's already pretty close to being done. Sprinkle this scallion over. And like, I'm gonna turn the heat off. Like it's done. So that is just how quickly this dish comes together. And that looks pretty dang great. Personally, I can't wait to get this, get my bowl of rice. Okay, so I did save a tiny bit of scallion. I'm just gonna sprinkle it over. This is optional. And that's it. Shrimp with egg, Cantonese classic. It really doesn't have to cook for long. The shrimp are still residually cooking in the heat, so you just really wanna make sure you avoid those rubbery shrimp. Like all the shrimp that are buried underneath the egg are still cooking. And let's go taste it. All right, we're gonna do a little taste test and see how this turned out. So as you can see, these layers of egg are just super delicious and honestly, I'm gonna critique myself and say that I probably went in for the first stir a little too soon. And I could have had the heat just a touch higher just to get that initial set on the egg, because you will see in the video, it just took a little, like those initial layers were a little bit thin for my liking, so it has this kind of more laminated look to it, you can kind of see. And the taste is still great, but the journey to perfection continues. I feel like the laminated look is good. That like folded, it's like folds of egg. I think that's it. Okay. It's good. I mean, I can quibble about the layers and the thickness of the layers, but this is really great. We've had some Cantonese restaurants that we've gone to over the years, like specifically for this dish. Can actually read about it in my dad's post. We'll link it. And to an older version of this recipe. And this is just as good as anything we had in a restaurant. So I'm very proud. Mm. The shrimp are perfectly cooked. Like New Orleans perfectly cooked? No. You gotta be from New Orleans to make that kind of shrimp. Both of the freshness of the shrimp makes it really good. Mm. So good. So that's Cantonese shrimp with scrambled eggs. Enjoy, folks. Mm. Ah! Sorry, I was pointing the camera at your butt. Sorry. Give it to me. Can I eat that? No. So I'm really excited to show you this Cantonese shrimp and scrambled egg recipe. Now, let's get on over to the wok. Actually, just kidding. We're gonna do some stuff here, and then we're gonna go over to the wok.