Lucas Makes Steamed Eggs, Two Ways | In the Kitchen with Lucas Sin

So we're back, we're making eggs today, steamed eggs. In China, we usually call it zhēng shuǐ dàn or shuǐ zhēng dàn, which is steamed water egg. It's as much of a recipe about the water as it is about the egg itself. There are versions of steamed eggs, obviously, in almost every East Asian culture. In Korean, we would call it gyeran jjim. In Japanese, it would be chawanmushi. Different cultures like to aim for different textures or different things that are mixed in. The Chinese one is usually, at home, just egg with a little bit of a sauce over the top. But we're going to make two versions today. The first is the one that I actually use at home most of the time. Most of the time, when I'm steaming eggs, I'm in the microwave. There are so many things that are good about the microwave. It's one of those like year 3000 level technologies that are already available to us now. And this is why we steam in the microwave because the way microwaves broadly work is that the little particles inside of the food are vibrating. The microwaves cause them to vibrate and they produce friction and friction produces heat. The good thing about microwaves is that every single particle within that microwave that's spinning is going to vibrate at the same frequency, which means that you're going to heat inside and out. When you're steaming in a conventional way, in a steamer, let's say, the heat comes from outside in. So oftentimes, you don't get as even of a result when you're steaming in a steamer. Of course, in professional settings, in larger batch settings, a regular steamer is usually more convenient, but the microwave for us home cooks, I think is really quite wonderful. So we're going to make two versions. The first one is going to be a steamed microwave egg with just a little bit of a seasoned soy sauce over the top. And the second is going to be made conventionally in case you don't want to use your microwave with tofu and a little bit of a pork sauce. Classic Food 52, this is what we do here, is we've embedded a secret recipe within the recipe video itself. And today, that secret recipe is going to be a seasoned soy sauce. I'll tell you why in a little bit. Quick thing about soy sauce, here's a typical light soy sauce that you can get in most Asian supermarkets. When people first encounter soy sauce and start using it, and I believe this is becoming an American classic sort of pantry staple, they might taste it on its own and find it quite aggressive. Soy sauce on its own is very, very salty. And when you're using it to season food or to finish food, oftentimes you're not supposed to... Oftentimes, you're not supposed to drink soy sauce out of the bottle. It doesn't taste very good out of the bottle. It's salty and umami, but it's not balanced, right? So when we're finishing dishes, let's say you're pouring something over a piece of steamed fish or steamed egg, usually you don't use it directly. You make a seasoned soy sauce. Seasoned soy sauce is great out of the bottle, but today I'm going to show you how to make your own out of the basic soy sauce flavorings that we have. The process is to activate a bunch of aromatics, infuse those aromatics into the soy sauce, and then dilute it, and then balance it out with sugar and umami. Once this pan is hot, I give it a little bit of oil. This is just a little bit of neutral oil to make sure that the aromatics don't stick to the bottom of the pan. Shallots. Stir-fry that until it's aromatic. All of that intense raw onion flavor, we want it to become sweet. Once everything begins to wilt, the scallions and the cilantro are going to go in. Stir-fry again. Oops. Get everybody to wilt. Light soy sauce goes in. That's the primary flavor. It is a soy sauce after all. And the light soy sauce is primarily for saltiness. We're going to crash in a little bit of water. The water helps to dilute the whole thing and give it a little bit more balance. But because water is colorless and we want it to look a little bit more like an actual soy sauce, we're going to add dark soy sauce for color and a little bit of that caramel flavor. The first umami booster in here is going to be Maggi. The way I think about it is Maggi is a little bit of a umami-forward soy sauce-like seasoning. Maggi is the original brand, but there are a lot of MSG-forward, or rather flavor-forward, in Chinese we call it 味極鮮, as in flavor extreme umaminess. And those are just like extra umami, extra MSG soy sauces. You'll find those soy sauce bottles in any sort of Asian Chinese supermarket that has Maggi-shaped bottles. The sugar is going to be rock sugar, a little bit like white sugar, which is a perfectly fine substitute to sweeten and balance the whole thing, as well as a little bit of MSG, and a pinch of white pepper. Instead of MSG, chicken powder, chicken bouillon, mushroom powder is also totally acceptable. All we have to do is just let that simmer so that all of the sugar dissolves, all of the flavors come together. Simmer about five minutes or so. Last step for the seasoned soy sauce is to strain it. We're squeezing it a little bit, get as much of that out of there as possible. I bet this would be delicious on rice, this stuff on top, but we don't want that today. Let it cool before you put it in the fridge. This is good to go, seasoned soy sauce. Anytime you need to top anything with a little bit of soy sauce, don't use it out of the bottle, use something like this. It's also, by the way, totally customizable. A lot of people who make a seafood soy sauce, right, would obviously add things like dried shrimp or fish sauce, just to boost up a little bit more of that seafood flavor. So, jiang sui dan, sui jing dan. Water and egg. So we're doing it Chinese style, super nice and clean. You need really nice eggs, obviously. There isn't a lot in this dish other than egg and water, so you want to make sure that you're doing the right thing with your eggs. You want to make sure that you're doing the right thing for the water. Now, we're aiming for quite a silky egg. If you really want to be a perfectionist about this, you're going to get a very still, mirror-like surface. If you don't really care and you just want it to be flavorful and delicious, you might get a little bit of ripples and air bubbles and stuff. It's going to take a lot of trial and error to get it right with your microwave. This is what works for us right now. Actually, to be frank, this is the first time I'm making this with this microwave and this studio, and that's a fourth wall broken. So we'll see what happens with this, but the basic recipe is the same. It's going to be one cup of liquid to two eggs with a pinch of salt. We're splitting that one cup of water per egg into two tubs of liquid. The first is dashi. So this is dashi that we've actually made from dashi concentrate. You can also use chicken stock. You can also use any sort of like flavorful liquid just to give this egg dish a little bit more oomph. And then second is this water. This water doesn't look like very much because it is water, but in Chinese cooking, it's important that this is cooked water. Now, this isn't a distinct distinction that's normally made in Western style sort of kitchens, but cooked water has a couple of properties. One is that it is slightly warm if you just cooked it, obviously, but second is that there is a lot of oxygen and like air bubbles, right, that's dissolved inside of the water. When you cook it, you force some of those things out. This cooked water is gonna allow your eggs to, it's gonna help your eggs become a little bit more still and a little bit more silky. Otherwise, it's gonna be a little bit more difficult to get all those bubbles out. So warm water also helps because if this mixture is very, very cold when it goes inside the microwave or the steamer, as it comes up to temp, those bubbles are gonna wanna burst out and that's where you get that rough surface. Again, all of this, honestly, in my opinion, it's a small textural improvement to get it very, very nice and still, but importantly, do whatever you'd like. The flavor is gonna be very similar. So here is a little bit of salt. Salt's gonna go in. Make sure all of that is dissolved. Salt does two things. Number one, it's gonna be for flavor. Eggs taste so much better with a little bit of salt. This is the correct amount. Second is, again, texture. The salt is gonna draw out a little bit of that water on the surface of a lot of these protein molecules, which is gonna eventually end up allowing for the water particles and the protein to stick together a little bit more during the cook process. If you don't add salt in the beginning and you add salt later after the cook, once the steamed eggs come out, you're gonna notice a ring of water on the top of your eggs. It's the same reason, if you watch the scrambled egg video, it's the same reason why I like to add a little bit of salt to the eggs before you scramble them, before you cook them. It just stops them from bleeding. Get this nice and smooth. And then it's going to go into our steaming microwave bowl. The bowl must be microwave-safe. It's gonna go through a sieve to get rid of some of those air bubbles and other solids that might have made it in there. Sometimes the egg white will have a little bit of trouble making its way through the sieve, which means that it's not whipped well enough. Stir this back up a little bit. Make sure it's even. And you'll notice that it's a little bit watery, but it is called shui zhong dan. As in water egg. Water is half of the ingredients. Just to take the bubbles out, we're gonna use a blowtorch, but you can also use a spoon just to skim this off. Does this matter? Obviously, if you take the bubbles off, you will get a more still surface, but at the end of the day, it's not the most important. We're going to cover this. Covering it helps it become a little bit more still. Actually, excuse me. This bowl is unglazed. Where's my wet towel? So plastic wrap sticks to water, and plastic wrap sticks to itself. It's a good trick. Get nice and tight. Restaurant trick. Cool. Poke a couple of holes in here because you don't want any condensation to drip back into the top of the egg. This is the first time I'm using this microwave, but at home, I have a 700-watt microwave, and I microwave it at 80% for two minutes and 30, and it's perfect. It is perfect. However, microwaves, especially when it comes to cooking, don't scale linearly, so it's not as if you had a 1,200-watt microwave. You could just take the ratio between 1,200 and 700 and multiply the time inversely, if that makes sense. It does really come down to trial and error. Ah. I think this is as delicious of a dish that you're gonna be eating it on a regular basis, which is to say, every time you make it, maybe switch up the cook a little bit. But mostly, we're looking for a pretty low wattage and a low-temperature cook. For anywhere, I'm gonna say I would start at two minutes and keep adding 30-second increments until you get to where you want that egg to be. Okay. See how it goes. First trial. This is a 1,400-watt microwave, which is quite hot. At two minutes, it's not perfect, but it is just cooked and totally acceptable. You see that surface? It's got those little bubbles that are trying to escape. And as this sits a little bit, the outside might be a little bit more cooked. And that's all symptoms of the microwave wattage being a little bit too high. But in terms of cookness, this is not cooked. Ah, so funny. So put that in the bloopers. Here's the deal. Here's the first one that came out of the microwave. And this microwave, again, is a 1,400-watt microwave, which is why it's cooking so hot. If you look to see, it's actually totally, it's cooked. There's a little bit of wateriness, probably because the heat was pushing in so hard. And the outside is a little bit dry. And with the bubbles, all that is symptoms of this being cooked at too high of a temperature or too high of a wattage, right? But if we were to cut in into the middle, you'll see that it is perfectly jiggly. And you actually, right in the center, almost close to perfect texture, right? It's a little wobbly. You could drain that water off, but that's all really nice, like softer than silken tofu, steamed egg. ♪ Spooning in a spoon, we don't even move ♪ ♪ Poached or fried or on the side, morning, night, or noon ♪ During the commercial break, we made another one. Let's see how it looks in the microwave. At a slightly lower wattage. And again, we're taking you on this journey for trial and error. And this one is slightly better. See that at the edges, again, it is a little bit overcooked, but the center is close to perfect. And when you wobble it around, that's what you wanna see, a little bit of jiggle. I would absolutely serve this, and the soy sauce on the side is gonna cover most of that imperfection. Before we finish and season the microwave version, we're going to make our conventional siever version. But this one, we're gonna load up with a little bit of tofu, which complements the egg texture and a pretty robust ground pork sauce, just to make this dish more of a one-dish dinner, one-dish lunch situation. So the tofu itself, we're going to deal with. We're gonna dice this one. Silken tofu really is the texture that you're aiming for, for the steamed egg in the first place, but it has a little bit of that tofu soy flavor, so it really complements it. This whole tofu, drained and cut into the bowl. Second thing, garlic and ginger for the pork sauce. So the garlic, usually I think about three cloves would be appropriate. This is one really big clove. Little tip, if you have them facing upwards, because you know how it goes up this way, if you have it facing upwards and you smash it, it'll pulverize a lot quicker than if you smack it from the side. Here, I'll show you. Maybe smack it from the side. Oh, nevermind. Okay, so we're just gonna mince this one up. One large clove or three small cloves. Doesn't have to be super fine, because it's gonna get cooked quite a bit. Ginger, similar thing. It's almost pulverized, and we're just gonna mince this one up. For ginger, the first cut, usually I think it needs to be sliced first and smashed to release those little hairs, and then you can do this. So the cleaver is the best tool for the task, but basically, you're pressing down, and usually you only get one chop on it, right? Chop, chop, chop, chop, chop, chop, chop. If you levitate your left hand and let the force of the right hand bounce onto the cutting board, the left-hand side's gonna come back up, it's gonna hit your hand, and it's gonna come back down. So for each action, we'll get two chops, if that makes sense. So super exaggerated, that's what you're doing, but if you move a little bit faster, you get double the amount of chops. The ginger, compared to the garlic, we're gonna cook a little bit finer because it's a little bit more tough. On to the pork. So usually, ground pork works really well. We're gonna dice our own pork today. Part of the deliciousness of pork that you chop up yourself is the inconsistency in the texture. So you have some that breaks down a little bit more, you have some that's a little bit more resistant. So we're gonna start off with just the dice. If you want your pork to be a little bit easier to slice, you can throw it in the freezer until it barely starts to hold its shape. So I'm just cutting into rough strips. So this is pork belly, by the way. I like pork belly because of the fat content, but if you're picking pork belly for this dish, you want it to be quite well-balanced, not too much fat. This is the type of thing that we call xia fan cai in Chinese, which is a dish to eat rice with. So feel free to make a little bit more. Put it on your noodles, put it on your rice, put it on whatever you're making. Roughly cut all of this into strips, and then we're gonna dice it. So in a stack like this, similar to the garlic and the ginger, you can do the bounce, go through it that way, and then change the orientation. And that's the type of inconsistency you like to see. If you beat it a little bit too much, it'll become a farce and it'll start becoming a little bit smooth. That's not what you want. Usually, the first step for making these sauces and stir-fries is activating your aromatics. In this case, we're going to render out a little bit of fat out of the pork belly before we add our aromatics because that lard is gonna carry the flavor. So just a little bit of oil to make sure that it doesn't totally stick. You want the oil to heat up before you add your pork. A lot of people have problems with stainless steel pans because the food sticks. It's because the pan needs to get hot before the oil goes in. The oil needs to get hot before the food goes in. Spread it out, get a little bit of color on there. Plot twist, turns out there isn't enough fat in here in the pork belly to start activating those aromatics. So we're gonna help with a little bit of oil just on the side. Make sure that gets hot. Move it to that side of the pan. And the ginger is gonna go in. Let that stir-fry up a little bit. And then the garlic. And then incorporate it into the rest of the pork. And then to deglaze, we're gonna add a little bit of water or chicken stock, or in this case, dashi, because we're making the egg already. We have some on the side. You basically want to add enough. Cover the pork about halfway. There you go. So that it is sauce-like, just like that. And then for the seasoning, light soy for sodium, dark soy for color, a little bit of oyster sauce for that complexity of flavor, and then just a pinch of MSG or chicken powder. Once all of those ingredients are together, we're gonna let this cook, bring it back up to a boil, to a simmer for those flavors to come together, and then we're going to thicken it. I think we've done this before, maybe in the tofu video, and also in the egg video, same technique. Once again, as we should all know by now, I much prefer potato starch to cornstarch. We're going to add it, not directly into the side of the pan, but onto where the pork is. We're gonna add it in a couple of stages to get it into that thick, viscous texture that we like. And know that when this cools down, it's gonna thin out a little bit, so you have to add it in stages. Here we go. Just a tiny bit more. There you go. Turn that off. This is the texture I'm looking for at the end. Glossy sauce, set that aside. And then we're gonna set up the steamer. This is the same egg mixture as the egg mixture before. This is gonna go into our steamer bowl, directly on top of the tofu. The tofu is gonna end up buried inside of the texture of the egg, which is going to be nice. And then this whole thing is gonna go inside of the steamer. Whatever steamer setup you have, the important thing is to bring it to its highest temperature, to a full boil, before you put your egg mixture in. Here. Put this just right in the center. Take out any bubbles with a blowtorch if you like. Put this down. Know that this is gonna be covered in pork sauce, so the top really does not matter as much. You just want to have a nice cook. So turn this down to a little bit lower, to a bit of a simmer, maybe like medium or so. Of course, steam only really exists at the boiling point of water, at 212 degrees Fahrenheit, but the volatility of that air does make a difference in terms of the cook. So we're just lowering down to basically let the air move a slightly bit less, so it's not as aggressive of a cook inside. We're gonna check it in like five or six minutes. So, about five minutes. We're just gonna check the progress here. Let some of that steam go. Oh, it's not cooked at all. Plot twist. Five more minutes. So it's been 12 minutes. Let's see where it is. There you go! Look! Now we're just gonna check the cookness here. Yep, there you go. So you see that swelling when I tip it on the side? It balloons a little bit. I want it to cook a little bit more, but it's nice and still, which means that the temperature is right. So I'm just gonna cover it again and go for another two minutes, two minutes. Nice and still, no air bubbles, pretty smooth. You can see a little bit of that tofu poking out, but it's perfect. This is what, honestly, what you're aiming for with the microwave one, but studio's short on time, so we're not gonna perfect this in this studio. Here's the finished product, the microwave version with just soy sauce, and then the conventional steamer version with soy sauce, pork sauce, and a little bit of tofu inside and chili oil. Time to taste. But first, to check the texture. Here's the one that came out nice. Tofu and egg, same texture. That's the wobble. That's what I'm talking about. Do the whole thing. Obviously, it's always best to eat this with a bowl of warm rice, a warm bowl of rice. Easy money, dude. How's that? Doesn't get better than this. Very, very perfect egg dish. It's seasoned well. Again, the chili oil is a little unconventional, but this is one of my favorite things in the world. Super simple. Many of us Asians grew up eating a version of this. Beautiful meal. Here's a slightly less perfect one, but let me show you once again that the center is going to be perfectly cooked, right? That's what I'm talking about. It's still super jiggly. It's just that the outsides are a little bit stiffer. Here, I'll show you the outside. Oh, no, firm mistakes. That is overcooked because of the wattage on that microwave. If you have the ability to turn the power of your microwave lower, keep playing with it and keep getting it right. I'm going to eat the good part. Soy sauce, so good, like impossible. Also, by the way, this dish is really, really good cold. All the dashi and the saltiness and the umaminess will temper as it sits. And this is actually a very good base on which to put maybe like, I mean, in the fine dining sense, sometimes they'll put like a foam or a little bit of a salad over the top. Cold, raw seafood like a crudo on top of this would also be delightful because of that consistency of the egg, it becomes almost a sauce when you mix it all up. These are two versions of Chinese steamed eggs with a secret seasoned soy sauce recipe. Get the recipes on food52.