Cantonese style Scrambled Eggs (黄埔炒蛋)

Mine - and Chiang Kai-Shek's - favorite way to scramble an egg.

Everyone’s got their favorite way to scramble an egg. The insane variety of approaches of how people approach this one ingredient – eggs – is rivaled by maybe only by the cereal grains. Some people love their soft, spoonable French Oeuf Brouilles served over toast; others love crispy browned Thai Khai Jiao with some rice and chili sauce.

But on the internet, there’s been one style that’s reigned supreme over the better of the past decade – French-style soft scrambled eggs, immortalized by that one video of Gordon Ramsey making them with a video for the Daily – spooned, of course, over toast.

And there’s certainly nothing wrong with that – it’s a good egg. But for me personally, I was never really that crazy about that sort of soft scramble. I like something with a bit more substance… something that you can actually enjoy eating sans-toast. Because in my head, a soft scramble is more of a ‘toast sauce’ than a proper scramble. I like my curds.

Of course, many curd-y approaches in the Anglosphere seem to aim for an end result that could be described (by its proponents) as ‘fluffy’ or (by its detractors) as ‘dry’. I can see both sides of the argument. At the end of the day, I personally probably prefer a curd-y scrambled egg, but do wish it was as rich and creamy as the soft scramble.

Enter to the conversation… Cantonese style scrambled eggs, a.k.a. Whampoa fried eggs. The best way I can describe Cantonese scrambled eggs is akin to an unrolled French omelet. You start to let the egg set, but then instead of rolling it up, you start to layer everything on top of itself. It’s a bit hard to describe. You’ll see.

History of Whampoa Eggs:

So right. What does this all have to do with Chiang Kai-Shek?

There’s two origin stories for this egg. The name of this dish, after all, is “Whampoa Eggs” in Chinese (黄埔炒蛋). What’s Whampoa? Well, historically, Whampoa was an anchorage boats outside of Guangzhou – but not just any anchorage, the primary anchorage in Guangdong for boats engaging in international trade. You can even find old Western paintings of the place. And right next to those docks there, there developed a military academy by the same name – “Whampoa Military Academy”, the central military academy for the Republic of China during the KMT years.

So. It depends who you ask. One story is that next to the docks there lived a number of Tanka– i.e. ‘boat people’, people that lived on junks off the coast in Guangdong and Fujian (sometimes derisively referred to as “sea gypsies” by the Brits). Apparently, back in the day, one common street snack around the docks was the Tanka’s legendary fried eggs. They’d heat up lard until very hot, pour it in a large porcelain pot, quickly deep fry some thoroughly whisked eggs, and let it drain. And while nowadays people don’t necessarily follow the same method, the story goes that the dish adapted and the name of the original street snack lives on.

Another telling of the story of Whampoa fried eggs is that the name derives from the military academy – specifically, that this was Chiang Kai-Shek’s favorite way of having eggs. Now, whether or not Chiang Kai-Shek was the origin is certainly up for debate. What’s much more certain is that he definitely seemed to have a passion for these eggs:

According to Ju Yiqiao’s, the person who cooked Whampoa Eggs in the military school was a Tanka named ‘Auntie Yan’. She lived on a boat the Pearl River, and was known as a very good cook. Years later, in 1936 Chiang Kai-shek returned to Guangzhou and revisited the old site of the Whampoa Military Academy. He remembered Auntie Yan, and pined with emotion: "I wonder if we can find her, so that we can have one more taste of that Whampoa Egg from a decade back.” Chiang’s staff hurriedly searched around for her, and ended up finding Auntie Yan working in the field. At that time, she was nearly fifty years old, but still in good health. Chiang was very happy to see Auntie Yan, took her into his house as an honored guest, and asked her how she’d been doing. She still replied with a sense of dignity: "Life is still normal, and I'm still cooking on the boat." Hearing that Chiang wanted to eat Whampoa eggs, she immediately went into the kitchen and made one for him. After Chiang ate, he praised the dish repeatedly.

Now, there’s a ton of legends having to do with Chiang Kai-Shek and these scrambled eggs – supposedly he ended up making them himself into his old age. There’s also a couple differences in his supposed technique and what we’re doing here. I’ll cover those in the notes below, but that’s probably enough dilly-dallying before the recipe.

Ingredients:

Now, the cool thing about this dish is that you’re not limited to just eggs. If you’re using eggs and nothing else, that’s the classic “Whampoa Fried Egg”. If you add stuff to it, it’s called a ‘huadan’ (滑蛋) – a name I’m having a bit of trouble translating (‘slippery egg’? nah that sounds stupid). Shrimp is a super common addition, ditto with beef.

So below, I’ll also show how to add some very basic add-ins, in the form of Char Siu BBQ pork and Chinese yellow chives. But feel free to let your imagination run crazy here. Sometimes I like adding some smoked Sichuan-style Larou (“Chinese Bacon”) in order to kind of mimic that American Breakfast taste. Sometimes I like tossing some julienned tomato it. Get creative. Curious what it’d be like with, I dunno, lobster? Chorizo and cheese? Knock yourself out. I love using this dish as a canvas to mess around.

1. 5 medium eggs.

2. Seasoning for the eggs:

   Salt, ½ tsp

   Sugar, ½ tsp

   Slurry of 1 tsp cornstarch (生粉) mixed with 1 tbsp water

   Liaojiu a.k.a. Shaoxing wine (料酒/绍酒), ½ tsp. Optional.

   Toasted Sesame Oil (麻油), 1 tsp. 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.

   White pepper powder, ⅛ tsp

   MSG -or- chicken bouillon powder (味精/鸡粉), ⅛ tsp

3. Lard, 2 tbsp. For frying. You can use butter for this too - preferably something clarified like ghee or clarified butter (to avoid potential browning), but I tested it with butter too and it works great. I also tested this with bacon grease, which is delicious, but definitely gives everything an 'American breakfast' flavor.

4. Optional Add-ins:

   Char Siu BBQ Pork (叉烧), ~60g;

   Jiuhuang yellow chives (韭黄), ~20g -or- the white portion of ~4 scallions.

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'. Also, 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:

Now… I’m going to split this process bit up into three sections. I know, I’m annoying. First, I’ll go over how to prep everything – whether you’re going for add-ins, or not. Next, I’ll show you how to fry this in a wok. And finally, because I believe that everyone should make these eggs, I’ve kinda hacked together a way to fry them in a non-stick pan sans wok :)

Prepping the Eggs:

1. Optional: Separate the whites from the yolks, whisk the egg white until large bubbles form. So, the very most classic way the prepare the eggs here to separate the whites from the yolks and whip the egg white separately. You’re not aiming for a meringue or anything, something like this is totally fine. We’ll mix those back together later, so the question naturally follows of what the point of the exercise is. I find that the mixture tends to stay ‘bubbly’ longer if I separate the whites from the yolks. I also have a hypothesis that, in a restaurant context, it might be useful because a head chef’d be able to put someone else on the job and quickly see if the eggs are beaten enough. You can give it a try both ways, but personally I usually don’t bother.

2. If you are adding any add-ins, cook them. These eggs cook in, like, a minute flat so any add-ins need to be pre-cooked. Generally this just means giving them a brief fry. For the above add-ins, that meant (1) toasting the Chinese yellow chives in a dry wok over a medium flame for ~2 minutes until fragrant and slightly wilted and (2) frying the Char Siu BBQ pork for ~1 minute with a touch of peanut oil. If you’re using the scallion whites in place of the chives, just fry them together with the Char Siu.

3. Re-combine the whites and the yolks (if you separated them). Whisk again. If you did not separate the eggs, just whisk it at this stage – go hard for about a minute, or until you see some obvious bubbles, like this.

4. Add the seasoning, quick whisk. Add any add-ins, quick mix.

Cooking on a wok:

So right. As you always do when working with a wok, first longyau: get your wok piping hot, to about steak searing temperature. Then shut off the heat and add in your oil – here we’re doing that two tablespoons of lard. Give it a good swirl so that you get a good distribution of lard, then toss that back over a high flame. Let it heat up a touch, ~30 seconds or so or until you can see little bubbles forming around a pair of chopsticks when you put it in the lard (this equates to ~180C).

Now drop in your egg. It will quickly puff up a bit. Grab your wok and move it off the flame. Now with a spatula scoop the cooked bits and lay them up to the side over your egg like this.

Now put the wok back on the flame. Wait until little bubbles form around the edges like this (sorry for the super low res image, I know you can barely see the bubbles there). At that point, take the wok back off the flame and layer again.

Continue through the motion until you have no more egg running off. The top will still look a bit gooey. This is the less cooked portion combining with the lard and forming a sort of ‘sauce’. It’s delicious, and what you want. This is the way I like my egg.

Now, for some people… that might be a little runny. If that describes you, you can then take the egg and flip it over on a plate. The residual heat will do the rest of the work. That said, I love my eggs just like that, and it’s definitely sexier if you don’t flip. In my opinion, at least.

Cooking in a non-stick pan:

So I love this sort of egg so much that I really wanted to figure out how you could mimic it in a sort of ‘standard American’ kitchen set-up. This was my approach, and I think it gets you a very similar egg.

Non-stick skillet, first toss in the lard. Heat it up over a high flame til melted and bubbles form around a pair of chopsticks. Then add in the egg.

After it puffs and sets, take the egg and pull it to one side of the pan. Then adjust your pan so that only the uncooked side is over the burner, like so. Then once you start to see the bubbles, layer it over the cooked portion.

Repeat until there’s no more egg, likely ~2 more times. This produced an egg that’s very similar to the wok version but a bit more spread out. To mimic the verticality then, you can sort of ‘cut’ the egg in half with your spatula, and lay one side over the other.

Note on different types of Whampoa fried eggs:

There are many, many ways to execute a Whampoa fried egg. 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 and then there’s also this dude, who’s just… impressive. The layering technique that I just taught you is simply one approach among many.

And I should also note that the heat control method that I employed there (i.e. on/off the flame) is very… non-standard. It was originally meant to mimic something they sometimes do in restaurants, where they’ll lift the wok up out of the wok burner, and keep it on the lip of the stove. As time went on, I just kind of got used to it. Maybe I still have Gordon Ramsay haunting my dreams or something, I dunno. It gives the correct end result, I feel, but if it’s a bit different than how your Cantonese mum or chef friend does it… know that I’m the weird one. But the basic logic is the same among everyone that employs the layering approach.

If you have a cast iron wok, you definitely don’t need to do the finicky on/off the flame bit that I did. Just pre-heat your wok, toss in the egg, and shut off the heat. You can cook the egg like we did with just the heat from the cast iron. Alternatively, even with a carbon steel wok, absolutely feel free to keep the wok on the flame during the whole process and just work quicker.

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 YT thumbnails to make after all). Reportedly this was Chiang Kai-Shek’s favorite way to have eggs.

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 me know because I did think the idea of a ‘meringue scrambled egg’ was very cool.