Egg Foo Yung

In my book, From Scratch: 10 Meals, 175 Recipes, I wanted to show how much we can learn when we learn a basic dish. This following Egg Foo Yung is from The Omelet chapter. The egg is the most versatile ingredient on the planet.

I want to extend the notion of omelets and scrambled eggs beyond their customary forms by including this excellent use of blended eggs cooked in a pan. Once you recognize that you can put more than chives and cheese in eggs, there seems to be little that won’t work this way. Here meat and vegetables are blended into the mix to create this classic Chinese-American dish, Egg Foo Yung.

I have a deep love of the Chinese-American food I ate growing up in Cleveland in the 1970s: diced meat battered, fried, then stir-fried in a sticky sweet-sour sauce, fried noodle dishes, big fat egg rolls with a thick blistered wrapper, chicken with cashews, and fiery kung pao chicken.

When the Jacques Pépin Foundation asked me to film a demo to help them raise money for their foundation, I wanted to honor his love of the omelet but also to do a recipe that was a little out of the ordinary, and chose this. (Become a member to get access two giant video cookbooks filled with demos by the countries best chefs. It's a great organization.)

What the dish is...

Egg foo yong, an elaborate egg pancake served with a savory sauce, is this kind of classic—the quintessential Chinese-American dish, as it appears to have been created by Cantonese cooks who had immigrated to the United States’ West Coast in the mid-nineteenth century. It got a bad name by the time it had become a staple in mediocre Chinese restaurants, but it deserves a wider audience, even a routine spot in your repertoire of dishes to prepare for friends. It’s just elaborate enough to merit dinner-party treatment, but it’s easy and can be prepared ahead of time. 

I also love it for what it has to say about the egg—that the egg makes an ideal framework, as it were, for other ingredients and flavors. The neutral egg here takes on deep notes of oyster sauce and soy sauce, sharpened by a bit of rice vinegar. It’s loaded with chopped vegetables and meat (I prefer a mixture of pork and chicken), which is really what it’s all about. The egg is just there to hold everything together—egg foo yong is like a fritter in that respect—and the addition of cornstarch allows the eggs to form distinct pancakes.

The sauce was originally simply chicken stock seasoned with soy sauce and thickened with cornstarch (see James Beard’s recipe in his classic American Cookery). But because the sauce is so prominent, it’s worth giving it a little more love with aromatics. It’s extraordinarily good if you use your own stock, but don’t not make this dish just because you don’t have homemade stock.

Finishing the Egg Foo Yung...

Eggs generally hold well, so these pancakes can be cooked and kept warm in a low oven for an hour or two without losing any of their deliciousness. (You can even refrigerate them and then microwave them—not perfect, but not bad either!)

This is a deeply satisfying and nourishing, dish. I prefer it served over rice to make a more substantial meal, but there’s no reason you couldn’t serve it with the sauce alone. Or you could even make mini pancakes and serve them with the sauce for dipping.

This dish is heavy on the mise en place. It's best to make the sauce the day before, or earlier, then make the egg pancakes.