Cantonese Stir Fried Milk (大量炒鲜奶)
A luxurious, classic Cantonese dish from Shunde.
This week, I wanted to teach you how to make a classic Cantonese dish – Daliang Stir Fried Milk.
Before we continue though, let’s just touch on the elephant in the room – stir frying milk. While the term ‘stir fried milk’ might be giving you visions of violently tossing milk around a jet engine wok burner… the “stir fry” here could perhaps be better translated as ‘scramble’. The majority of Chinese scrambled egg dishes, after all, if you literally translated them character-by-character would be some sort of variety of “stir fried egg” (i.e. 炒蛋).
But I guess ‘scrambled milk’ also doesn’t make a ton of sense at first blush. Here’s what’s going on – you’re gunna be taking some egg white, adding the maximum possible quantity of milk you can possibly add to it, then toss in a bit of starch to help it along. It’s usually cooked with some sort of seafood component, and topped with nuts to give it some texture. The final result is something like… a cream sauce that has the texture of a scrambled egg. It’s… fucking awesome.
The way I wanted to do this process was to separate out the shrimp prep, because we kind of went the whole nine yards there (and not a mile you should feel obliged to necessarily walk).
Ingredients:
So this is a dish that – as served – is almost in our “western supermarket club”. In the recipe below we subbed out two impossible-to-find-abroad Chinese ingredients (Jinhua Ham and Indian Almonds), but besides that almost everything should be available at, like, a Stop & Shop.
The larger limiting factor here is likely going to be cookware. This dish will be vastly easier to execute if you have a round bottomed wok, though those sorts of very round flat bottomed woks should also work fine. If you have a standard flat bottomed wok or are using a non-stick skillet you are likely going to need to be adaptive and play things by ear.
160g whole milk and 75g heavy cream -or- 235g water buffalo milk. Ok, so the ‘milk’ in this dish traditionally referred to water buffalo milk – a local specialty of Shunde, Guangdong (where this from). The water buffalo milk we get here in Guangdong clocks in at roughly 13% fat – so we’ll need to supplement that with cream in order to get it to about the same richness.
Four egg whites, ~130g. The second leg of the stir fried milk – egg white. The most very most traditional recipes I’ve seen usually go with a ratio of two parts milk to one part egg, but we like ours a touch on the eggy side (this is ~1.8 parts milk to 1 part egg white). In general, this dish is easier to execute the less milk you use, so feel free to err on the side of more egg white than less, especially when first starting out. If you go past 1:1 ratio however, I don’t think you can call it stir fried milk anymore.
Cornstarch (玉米生粉), 13g. Apologies for the weird quantity here, it’s based off of one tenth of our egg whites. As an aside, with this dish it is important to specifically use cornstarch (and not potato starch, tapioca starch, etc).
Shell-on shrimp, ~200g. This dish’ll usually have some kind of seafood component – crab is another classic. Smaller shrimp are better because they can incorporate better in the final dish. As an aside, 200g shell on shrimp equates to roughly 100g shell off shrimp (feel free to use shelled shrimp I suppose, but if you’re using frozen/packaged I’d probably just swap this out for tinned lump crab meat).
Marinade for the Shrimp: ¼ tsp salt, ¼ tsp sugar, a sprinkle of white pepper powder (胡椒粉), ¼ tsp liaojiu a.k.a. Shaoxing wine (料酒/绍酒), ~1/2 tsp oil to coat. Pretty sure the Shaoxing wine here is the only thing not available in a Western supermarket in this recipe? Feel free to sub with dry sherry, white wine, sake, whatever.
Char Siu Barbecue Pork (叉烧肉) -or- whatever non-smoked pork product, 50g -or- Jinhua ham/Proscuitto/Jamon Serrano/Virginia Ham, 15g. Ok, so this is Char Siu a substitute. Generally you’ll see this dish with a bit of Jinhua ham – a dry cured ham that’s a bit akin to Spanish Jamon Serrano. What you’d do is steam the ham together with a touch of rock sugar so that it softens… then mince it, fry til crisp and sprinkle that on the final dish. That said, I know Jinhua ham is completely unavailable in the USA (there’s an import ban), and even if I tell people to sub it there’ll still be people that insist on going on a fruitless wild goose chase to find the stuff. So while ideally you could sub Jinhua with similar unsmoked, dry-cured hams… don’t stress it. We used Char Siu barbecue pork here, diced into ~1cm sections, which’s rare here but not completely unheard of. Honestly though… there’s a lot of pork products that would totally work well here – if you wanna use honey roast ham, use honey roast ham. Just don’t use anything smoked, as that’d kinda contrast with the rest of the dish.
Peas (豌豆), ~1.5 tbsp. Just for some color and crunch. Totally optional.
Slivered Almonds -or- Pinenuts -or- Indian Almonds (榄仁), ~1.5 tbsp. So finishing this off with nuts is pretty mandatory. The traditional nut here is the Lanren, or Indian Almond… which is AFAIK not only unpurchaseable in the West, but also these days outrageously expensive in China (like… USD $7 for 50g expensive). I would describe it as a pinenut with the flavor of an almond – in the video, we used slivered almonds to sub, but in hindsight a bit of pinenuts might be better.
To season the milk mixture: ½ tsp salt, ½ tsp sugar, ¼ tsp white pepper powder (胡椒粉), ¼ tsp MSG (味精). As an aside, we usually buy whole white peppercorns and grind it into a powder ourselves. If you’re, like, using McCormicks… double the white pepper quantity in this and all other recipes.
Lard (猪油), 3 tbsp. For frying. Lard is pretty much a must here.
Process, Prepping the Shrimp:
So right. We decided to go the whole nine yards and:
Peel the shrimp, removing the digestive track when taking off the head
Rinse under running water for 10-15 minutes to de-slime
Vigorously dry the shrimp with a kitchen towel
Butterfly the shrimp
Marinate the shrimp
Pass the shrimp through oil (here we’ll just go with a quick, oily stir fry in place of a deep fry given the small quantity we’re working with).
If that looks like something you don’t want to do, I totally get it. If I was cooking for myself I’d probably just boil them shell-on, shell the suckers, and fuck deveining (I… generally can’t be bothered).
But again, I’m going to assume that you’re using fresh shrimp here. We’re spoiled and can get shrimp live from our local market – I assume others don’t have the same luxury, but reasonably fresh shrimp from the supermarket should be totally fine. If frozen’s the only option… I might personally just swap for lump crab meat.
So right. Shrimp prep:
Shell the shrimp. I like removing the digestive track when taking off the head – there’s a small black string that connects the mouth to the track. This way you don’t have to devein with a toothpick or whatever, which’s personally my least favorite kitchen chore… ever.
Deslime the shrimp. So shrimp usually have a thin layer of slime between their shell and their body… and it’s that slime that can sometimes make shrimp a little mushy when cooking shell-off. Two options. First, we will usually let the shrimp sit in a bowl under running water for 10-15 minutes – they’ll be done once the shrimp look white and flushed. Option two – you can let the shrimp soak in still water with a bit (~1tsp) of Kansui, or Sodium Carbonate (i.e. baked baking soda) – they’ll be ready once they look pinkish and almost ‘cooked’. And if you want to go super crazy? You can actually also use a combination of the two approaches…
Place the shrimp on a kitchen towel, roll them up to dry them out. Take the shrimp out of the water and shake them a couple times to remove the large bulk of the liquid. Then move them over to a kitchen towel, pat them dry, then roll up the towel. You want to make sure these are really, really dry – this process’ll remove any leftover slime, as well as let the marinade better absorb into the shrimp.
Butterfly the shrimp. My knife skills when it comes to butterflying shrimp aren’t the highest level or anything, fair warning. But just cut from the back of the shrimp (i.e. where the digestive track was) and stop right before you cut all the way through. Then open it up like a book, and optionally flatten it a bit with your knife or fingers.
Marinate the shrimp. Add in the salt, sugar, and white pepper powder. Give it a mix. Then add the liaojiu/Shaoxing wine, then another mix. Finally, coat with the oil and give it another mix. Set aside for 5-15 minutes.
Fry the shrimp. So we’ll be doing a quick, oily stir-fry here. As always, first longyau – get your wok piping hot (i.e. about steak searing temperature), shut off the heat, and add in the oil – here, about a third of a cup. Then with the flame on maximum, let the temperature come up to the point where you can see some bubbling on a pair of chopsticks. Add in the shrimp, stir fry for ~30 seconds, then dip them out.
Keep the shrimp in a strainer until you’re ready to make the stir-fried milk to let any excess oil drip off.
Process, Stir-Frying Milk:
So one thing that we just need to get out of the way at first – traditionally, there’s this whole important step of heating the buffalo milk first, then carefully whisking it with the eggs and starch so that everything combines evenly.
The traditional way is cool and it works. Another thing that works just as well? Tossing everything in a blender and giving it a quick ten second blitz. So we will be lazy twenty first century cooks here an go that route, but if you don’t own a blender you can absolutely go the traditional route as well (sidebar: basically, what you’d do is heat the milk up to ~70C then mix a bit into your starch, get that all good and even, toss the starch/milk into the egg white while whisking… then slowly pour the rest of the milk in while whisking constantly).
Dice the Char Siu, Blanch the Peas, Roast the Almonds. Peas were blanched for ~1 minute then dunked in a bowl of cool water. Almonds were roasted at 180C for 3 minutes.
Prep the shrimp. See the process for shrimp prep above. Obviously some of the almond roasting/Char Siu dicing/pea blanching can be done simultaneously with the shrimp prep, but your mise is up to you.
Mix the starch with enough of your milk so that it just comes together, reserve. I’d venture ~20g of milk. Milk it with your hands so that everything’s nice and even and there are no clumps.
Add the egg white, the cream, the milk, the milk/starch mixture, and your seasoning to a blender. Blitz for 10 seconds. Transfer to a bowl.
Stir-fry the milk. Ok, so the technique that we’re doing here is a layering technique that’s a bit difficult to explain in writing. Here’s a link to exactly this step in the video, and here’s a full, uncut view of the process if you prefer. High level overview – we’re going to let the milk/egg mixture just set enough so that it’s a thin film along the wok, then scrape that off and reserve on a plate. After doing that a couple times, we’ll add in our other ingredients (sans nuts) and fold the milk up and over those ingredients. Finally, when serving we’ll add those scraped curds on top:
First, longyau: get the wok piping hot, shut off the heat, and add in the lard. Do not go cheap with the lard. This is not a health dish.
Flame on medium-high. Heat the lard until it’s bubbling around a pair of chopsticks. Give the milk a final super brief paranoid whisk. Add the egg/milk mixture. It should quickly bubble and the film around the outside will form.
Assuming that the film has formed (sometimes it takes ~5-10 seconds if the oil’s not so hot), lift the wok up and give it a swirl. Then take it off the heat. Scrape 1-2 seconds of the film off – your initial scraped sections’ll be comparatively uglier, so don’t sweat it too much (I saw one chef that would toss the first scraped section).
Back on the flame. Let it cook on the flame without touching it for ~15 seconds. Then repeat – swirl it again, get that film. You’ll know the milk’s ready for a scraping once you can see little bubbles form in the film. Move it off the flame.
Give it two scraped to get your silky curds. These will be your ‘show’ section of your stir-fried milk. This is where I’ve seen most chefs that use this technique stop, but I love these silky scraped bits so we’ll do this all one more time.
Back on the flame. ~15 seconds to set. Swirl. Off the flame. Scrape. Back on the flame.
Add in the shrimp, peas, and char siu to the milk. Optionally reserve a touch of shrimp for garnish and such. Scooch them up the side of the wok, and slightly tilt the wok so that the bulk of the egg/milk mixture’s right over the flame.
Once you can see the bubbles in the set film ala above, scrape the milk up and over the shrimp/pork/peas. Keep the wok tilted so that the unset milk drips back down into the hot center. Continue until there is no liquid milk/egg remaining (though a touch of runniness is nothing to be paranoid over).
Transfer to a plate. Lay the scraped sections over. Sprinkle over the roasted sliced almonds. Devour.
What to serve this with:
One of my favorite restaurants that does this dish in Shunde serves theirs up with some “Wild Chicken Rolls” (野鸡卷, which are sliced and – interestingly – contain zero chicken). This is a picture of what it looks like.
I do think that if I were serving this dish up to a mixed crowd it might be a decent way to serve it. Of course, I can’t seem to find any wild chicken roll recipes in English (arg, guess we’ll just have to do it… here’s a video in Mandarin though).
During testing though, I had a lot of leftover buffalo milk and lard, and used it up by making American-style biscuits (added a bit of yogurt to my buffalo milk for my buttermilk sub… which’s unfortunately completely unavailable here). And naturally, I ended up eating those lard biscuits with the stir-fried milk which… really, really worked. I’d recommend it enough that I’m actually talking about it here lol – if you want a full recipe I’m game, but just FYI I think the stir-fried milk would go best with biscuits made from lard or shortening, as those’ve got a more neutral flavor.
On other ways of stir-frying milk:
So if you look at the above stir-fried milk that I linked, you’ll see that it’s got a bit more of a pudding-like consistency than ours was. This is because their method of stir-frying the milk is likely different than ours is – the scraping/folding seems to be a bit more of a modern restaurant invention. It’s personally the sort the we like the best, but I’d venture that it’s a minority of kitchens that go that route (I’d guess… 20-30% of restaurants in Shunde today?).
A more traditional was of stir-frying the milk is by using ~medium-low heat and slowly stirring the milk. This makes the consistency a bit less silky and a bit more like French soft scrambled eggs (I’m more of a larger curd guy myself). This video is in Mandarin, but here’s a good visual of a chef doing it that way:
From what we can tell, this is also the technique that’s traditionally most common in home kitchens here in Shunde.
So if you have older friends or family that talk about this dish… they’d probably be referring to that method. Just something to consider.
One trick to getting a nicer result that way is to cook ~one third of the milk/egg mixture together, removing it, then adding it back to the remaining bit once it’s almost done cooking.
On other cultures’ food and the importance of framing:
So I wanted to share something that might risk making you tentative about this dish, but I think it’s important nonetheless: Andrew Zimmern eating stir fried milk in Guangzhou in Bizarre Foods, Season 2 Episode 7. You can see a (low quality, obviously) version of it on YouTube here.
The TL;DW is that he… basically spit it out. Our brave Columbus’s hot-take:
Now there are some foods that repulse even me. I’m not especially fond of mushy, jelly-like textures like the one in this shrimp and milk dish.
See, with a lot of foods you should just… eat it. You shouldn’t really spend too much time looking at it – you might be psyching yourself out.
[It tastes] like fatty egg whites. It’s almost a neutral flavor, but the texture is just… not good. For… my tastes. Big sigh Oh. And I can’t quite tell you how out of place the flavor of cooked shrimp is with this sort of congealed milk skin. Ugh.
Now, as someone that adores this dish, and respects how difficult it is to make well, it’s… easy for me to read that and get angry. Who the fuck is this random dipshit from Minneapolis one to judge a great dish like stir fried milk?
But… I don’t think that’s quite fair to Zimmern. Because it’s pretty clear that he didn’t actually know what he was going on with the dish. He thought that he was actually eating, well, congealed milk.
Compare the above reaction to the account of Chef Luo Funan, the chairperson of the Shunde-Chef Association, when they were invited to UNESCO’s offices in France to judge Shunde’s possible entrance into UNESCO’s list of Creative Cities of Gastronomy:
“We demonstrated the unique cooking technique of soft stir-frying the local cow milk. The members of UNESCO were amazed to see how the snowy white semi-solidified milk was garnished with colorful and aromatic ingredients like small fresh shrimps with their shells removed, chicken livers, crispy deep-fried olives, Chinese sausages and hams. We also made the ginger juice milk pudding by pouring the hot cow milk into a bowl with ginger juice right before their eyes. They were stunned to see how the cow milk coagulated as soon as the ginger juice was added. After the UNESCO conference, we were awarded [the certificate]”.
Pretty striking contrast, yeah? The same dish that Zimmern was ‘repulsed by’ was deeply instrumental in awarding Shunde’s entrance into UNESCO’s esteemed list. And I sincerely doubt that that’s because a random assortment of French chefs were somehow more intrinsically open minded than the dude that make a living extolling the virtues of eating duck feet and cow pizzle. It’s that they saw the dishes getting cooked on front of them. Unlike Zimmern, they knew that the dish wasn’t just some slapdash effort at a sort of unpressed paneer.
So if eating something new – especially something from another culture – it helps immeasurably if you go into it with the correct context. If you’re eating century egg on a dare (or on the last round of a “will it?” episode) with the prior that you think it’s made with horse urine (it’s decidedly not), you’re probably not going to like century egg. If you’re eating century egg sliced up in some congee with the prior that it’s cured with alkaline salt… you’re probably going to like it just fine.
I’m not 100% sure where I’m going here, to be honest. I guess I just see the way certain dishes are presented in the wider media environment (in the USA at least) – i.e. “OMG hey, look at this out-there, crazy thing!” – and I feel like it frames a lot of the cuisine out here in a weird way. Like, the reality here is simultaneously more delicious and more pedestrian than you might see on, like, a lot of YouTube travel vlogger thumbnails.