Whampoa stir-fried eggs! This is a classic egg dish and – what’s for me at least – my very most favorite way to scramble an egg. One of the cool things about this egg frying method is that you can add in an assortment of other ingredients – when they’re other stuff added in, it’s generally referred to as ‘[whatever] huadan’. In the video we show you a simple sort with Char Siu barbecue pork and Chinese yellow chives, but feel free to get creative.

A bit fuller of a recipe is over here on /r/cooking, if you prefer:

Recipe: Mine – and Chiang Kai-Shek’s – favorite way to scramble eggs (黄埔炒蛋) from Cooking

INGREDIENTS

– 5 medium eggs

– Seasoning for the eggs: 1/2 tsp salt, 1/2 tsp sugar, a slurry of 1 tsp cornstarch (生粉) mixed with 1 tbsp water, optional 1/2 tsp liaojiu a.k.a. Shaoxing wine (料酒/绍酒), 1 tsp toasted sesame oil (麻油), 1/8 tsp white pepper powder (白胡椒粉), 1/8 tsp MSG -or- chicken bouillon powder (味精/鸡粉). Quick note that more traditional than the 1 tsp toasted sesame oil would be to add melted lard in the mix. You can definitely do that too, but I personally find it slightly redundant in the amount of lard I’m frying in. Totally up to you – if you feel strongly on the subject, add in, let’s say… 2 tsp of melted lard.

– Lard, for frying. In the video I said 1.5 tbsp, but let’s go 2 tbsp (I decided to measure again after cutting the footage, apologies it’s one of those things I always eyeball). You can use butter for this too – preferably something clarified like ghee or clarified butter. I also tested this with bacon grease, which is delicious, but definitely gives everything an ‘American breakfast’ flavor.

– Add-ins: Char Siu BBQ Pork (叉烧), ~60g; Jiuhuang yellow chives (韭黄), ~20g -or- the white portion of, I dunno, ~4 scallions. Optional, of course.

If you’re thinking about getting creative with you add-ins, I’d say that the quantity I like adding – if you don’t mind me getting all grandmother with this recipe – is somewhere around a ‘handful’s worth’. If you want to get fusion-y with your ingredients, remove the Shaoxing wine and toasted sesame oil from the ingredient list (you can swap with relevant equivalents if you like, or just skip them). If you are adding something very salty as an add-in, be mindful of the salinity here – when I do this with smoked Chinese bacon, I’ll cut the salt back to 1/4 tsp.

PROCESS

– Optional: separate the whites and yolks, whisk the whites until large bubbles start to form.
– If using any add-ins, cook your add ins. For us, we toasted the Chinese yellow chives for 2 minutes in a dry wok (note: Chinese yellow chives are very different from Western chives, do not toast your western chives for two minutes), and stir-fried the Char Siu for ~1 min
– Once you’re almost ready to fry, add the whites back to the yolks. Whisk again. If you did not separate the eggs, whisk for ~1 minute or until you start to see big bubbles.
– Add in the seasoning. Quick whisk.
– If you have any add-ins, add the add-ins. Quickly combine.
– Fry according to the method in the video.

The famous Western-style soft scrambled egg video if you’ve been living under a rock: https://youtu.be/PUP7U5vTMM0 Actually a nice video now that I re-watch it.

And check out our Patreon if you’d like to support the project!

http://www.patreon.com/ChineseCookingDemystified

Outro Music: คิดถึงคุณจัง by ธานินทร์ อินทรเทพ
Found via My Analog Journal (great channel): https://youtu.be/GHaL5H-VYRg

ABOUT US
—————————————————————————————–
We’re Steph and Chris – a food-obsessed couple that lives in Shunde, China. Steph is from Guangzhou and loves cooking food from throughout China – you’ll usually be watching her behind the wok. Chris is a long-term expat from America that’s been living in China and loving it for the last twelve years – you’ll be listening to his explanations, and doing some cooking at times as well.

This channel is all about learning how to cook the same taste that you’d get here. Our goal for each video is to give you a recipe that would at least get you close to some of our favorite restaurants here. Because of that, our recipes are no-holds-barred Chinese when it comes to style and ingredients – but feel free to ask for tips about adaptations and sourcing too!

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35 thoughts on “Cantonese style Scrambled Eggs (黄埔炒蛋)”

  1. Hey guys, a few notes:

    1. First off, quick note that more traditional than the toasted sesame oil in the seasoning of the egg would be some more melted lard. Personally, I just feel that the frying lard ends up incorporating with the egg in a way that renders the melted lard in the egg itself sort of optional. The most correct way would be to swap that ~1 tsp of toasted sesame oil with ~1 tbsp of lard. Up to you.

    2. Looking at that quantity that I was frying with again… I re-measured it, and found that I was really much closer to two tablespoons. Apologies, it’s one of those things that I always end up eye-balling.

    3. If you’re working with a cast iron wok, you actually don’t need to put the egg on and off the flame. Just pre-heat you wok, add in the egg, and turn off the flame. The residual heat will do the rest. The on/off the flame bit is actually sort of our own approach to mimic lifting the wok up to the lip of the wok burner like they do in restaurants. Note that the on/off the flame thing we do here would be considered very non-standard. But it gets us to a very nice end result IMO.

    4. On that note though, there’s a million ways to execute this dish. Just type “黄埔炒蛋” into YouTube, and you can look at the sheer diversity of what you find. Here’s a good video showing another classic ‘step-by-step’ approach https://youtu.be/8SVZ1AXLqP4 and then there’s also this dude, who’s just… impressive https://youtu.be/oWUsCCCuoS8 . The layering technique that we show in the video is simply one approach among many.

    5. Another classic approach is the step-by-step approach linked above, but keeping the egg at a doneness more similar to what we show in our video. After you finish frying, you then flip the egg on the plate so that the cooked portion on top cooks the uncooked portion. Also a very cool approach – we just love the gooey/ribbon-y look that this layering technique provides (and hey, we do have YouTube thumbnails to make after all). Reportedly this was Chiang Kai-Shek’s favorite way to have eggs.

    6. There are many legends of Chiang Kai-shek making these sorts of eggs – one is that he’d whipped the egg white hard enough so that they’re stiff enough that chopsticks can stand in the whipped white. This is basically the Chinese equivalent of ‘stiff peaks’, and is employed in a handful of dishes. We did try testing it, and that gives you… a pancake lol. There could definitely be something we’re missing there, but because we’ve only seen that ‘chopstick story’ online and not in any of our books, we’re tentatively willing to write that one off as a potentially confused rumor. If you do follow that method though, let us know because I did think the idea of a ‘meringue scrambled egg’ was very cool.

    7. These eggs could have gotten their name from Chiang Kai-shek’s time at the Whampoa military academy, or they could have gotten their name from the Tanka boat people that lived along the Huangpu river by the old port in Guangzhou. The latter is the story that Steph’s Dad shares. Their technique was reportedly as Steph described in the outro, and yeah… we just couldn’t seem to get something not-greasy there. While it’s possible that hey, it was the early 1900s, maybe people just liked stuff dripping with lard… we’re leaning more towards that there’s something that we’re just not understanding. Unlike the ‘stiff peaks’ story, there seems to be a lot more solid basis here. So if you know anything, definitely let us know.

    8. Oh btw, if you’re curious about how hot ‘bubbling around a pair of chopsticks” is… we’re working at ~180C if you pool the oil in your pan/wok.

    9. As I say in the description, butter can work. Personally I would try for something clarified like ghee or clarified butter if convenient (to avoid browning), but on a whim I tested it with some bog-standard Western butter and it works fine. It obviously provides a different flavor than the lard, but I’d still call it the same category of ‘thing’. I also tested this once with bacon grease – delicious in its own way, but undeniably morphs into that ‘American Breakfast’ flavor.

    10. Oh, and by the way… uh… sorry to any Cantonese people watching. This video is another entry in an ongoing list of instances of "Chris tries to respect Cantonese food and culture by… absolutely butchering the language and pronouncing words like they're Mandarin" lol. Again, I really am sorry, I'm just… not one of those language guys – took 12 years for me to reach even this level of Mandarin haha. I know I should learn. One day, promise.

    EDIT: To everyone that's saying that these are 'undercooked', do you also hate this – https://bit.ly/34bnfOV and this – https://bit.ly/3i9lxlT ? Because this's about as cooked as the former, and definitely way more cooked than the latter…

    Totally cool to have different preferences though, of course. If you want it a bit more done than shown here, you can flip the egg onto the plate when finished. The residual heat'll really help everything cook completely though

    Reply

  2. My favourite was similar to this at one of the restaurants I worked. The chef there added fresh legs to the half ready scrambled eggs one by one and it resulted almost the same. It was very delicious. This technique seems to be very easy though.

    Reply

  18. one of my ruined attempts though, was when I tried adding pureed/blended tomato to the mix. Although I already had cooked it before, I have a feeling trying to add other liquid parts before the egg cooks, makes for a completely different texture. It was more or less the same result than when I used to add butter (ramsey style) or cream cheese to the egg mixture, so my observation is, once a different liquid is added in a big quantity, the egg does not have air nor space anymore…

    Reply

  19. hey, you know what? when I saw gordon ramsay's egg mess, I instinctively knew it would be a disaster, but I tried it anyway. It ruined my cooking pan at the time.

    Now, I tried your recipe. First attempts were a bit messy, but then I tried the frying pan technique rather than the wok pan and the result was better-looking. I ate my egg with some crispy chilli's.

    And came to thank you because it is very delicious!!! and it only took 5 minutes (with 2 eggs).

    Reply

  27. I was in HK for work during the late 1980s. I remember eggs like this well. TBH though, the best scrambled eggs I've ever had was in Rome, at a little cafe near my hotel

    Reply

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