Egg Foo Young – Retro Recipe

Yet another recipe from my old cookbooks.

This one I marked because I remember this dish fondly. Every year for birthdays or special occasions, we had a restraunt we would frequent as a family. And one thing we’d always get was the Egg Foo Young.

It was my dads favorite, and he always wanted to figure out how to make it, but we never made it that far. Until today. After looking at the recipe. Its basically an omelet! And granted, I never quite got the omelet folding skill mastered, they are still relatively easy to make!

So this last Sunday, that weeks dinner with my mom, we decided to make Egg Foo Young, Chow Mein, a cucumber salad and then of course we always have fruit on the table with dinner as well.

The egg foo young was much easier to make than I was expecting it to be. My biggest challenge is when the egg foo young would be made at the Chinese restraunts, they always seemed to be thicker. Taste wise however, they were right on point to some of the egg foo young I’ve had in the restraunt. The sauce however, didn’t taste right, and I felt like the amount they told me to add of each ingredient wasn’t enough, cause in the end I didn’t really have enough to cover all the egg foo young I made.

Ingredients:

For the sauce:

2 tsp Soy Sauce

1 tsp Cornstarch

1 tsp Sugar

1 tsp Vinegar

3/4 tea Salt

1/2 cup cold water

Egg Mixture:

1 cup drained canned beansprouts

2/3 cup thinly sliced onions

1 cup cooked shrimp, cooked or canned

Leftover, chopped up pork (optional)

6 eggs

2 tbsp bacon fat/ oil

Directions:

About 50 minutes before supper, go ahead and make the sauce. In a saucepan, combine all the ingredients for the sauce and cook over low heat until thickened.

Combine the beansprouts with the onions and shrimp. Then with a fork, beat the eggs. Add beansprout mixture. In hot fat, skillet fry as pancakes, about 1/4 cup of mixture at a time, only turning once. Arrange on a hot platter, and cover with the heated sauce.

These ingredients and instructions are right out of the book. So lets tell you about my experience. First off, I couldn’t find canned bean sprouts anywhere. I went to 3-4 different stores, nowhere did I find them. Then I mentioned earlier the amount of ingredients required did not make enough sauce for us. So I actually had to make a double batch of the sauce to get them to cover all the foo young.

Taste wise, they were delicious. I need to cook them longer, as some of them fell apart during the flipping process. There towards the end I started to get the hang of it; so I think next time, I’ll remember to cut the shrimp, and cook the patties a tiny bit longer, and I’ll be on my way to having very delicious Egg Foo Young. I love that the old cookbook gave me a base line to go off of, and now I can tweak it for my own tastes as well as my families.