Chinese (Traditional) Egg Salads

Three 'Egg Salads': Garlic Eggs from Henan and Shandong, Pounded Eggs from Yunnan, and a quick Liangban Salad popular these days on the Chinese internet

• Click to jump to Northern Garlic Egg recipe

• Click to jump to Yunnan Pounded Egg recipe

• Click to jump to Modern Liangban Egg recipe

What you’re looking at above is jidansuan (鸡蛋蒜), or “Garlic Eggs”. They’re a humble village dish from the North of the country, seen in pockets around Henan, Shandong, and Northern Jiangsu.

And like… let’s call a spade a spade: the thing really looks like an egg salad sandwich. And in some ways, it is an egg salad sandwich — depending on the strictness of your definition of ‘egg salad’ and ‘sandwich’. It’s a dish that’s designed to be downed with steamed mantou buns, as the swath of China from which it hails is squarely flour country.

China’s wheat-rice divide, from the SCMP. I’ve (roughly) circled the area where Garlic Eggs are found.

Now, we’ve talked at length about xiafancai (“over rice dishes”, “send the rice down dishes”) — i.e. dishes meant to be eaten with rice. But home kitchens north of the wheat-rice divide also have a similar relationship with their staple grain: in certain areas meals are designed around noodles, elsewhere mo flatbreads, still others the flour-tortilla-like Spring Pancakes (eating in a way not totally unlike what you’d see in Mexico).

And it’s dishes in these Mantou bun regions that, I think, have a lot of potential for porting into western kitchens. Just look at how much milage restaurants got out of ‘bao buns’ in the 2010s — while bread and steamed buns aren’t a 1-to-1 match, there tends to be more than a little interoperability.

And when it comes to egg salads? In my personal opinion, the foundation of any great egg salad is an emulsified yolk — slightly breaking down, incorporating into the dressing itself in order to make everything rich and saucy. In the west, we tend to accomplish this emulsification feat with ‘a metric fuck ton of mayonnaise’. A strong move, and one that warms the heart of a hardcore mayo-enthusiast like myself. But not everyone loves mayonnaise as much as me, and in Henan they emulsify instead with ‘a metric fuck ton of crushed garlic’.

The end result is… very garlicky, almost to the point of having a kick. You probably wouldn’t want to blindly pile it into a sandwich, but (1) it’s phenomenal on steamed buns and (2) it’s also pretty great smeared onto a bagel, in my opinion.

Northern Garlic Eggs (鸡蛋蒜)

If you do not own a mortar, refer to the note at the end of the post.

Hard boil:

• Six eggs

as you like to hard boil eggs. We start ours in a pot with cold water and boil for eight minutes, then rinse under cool water and peel.

To a mortar, add

• Six cloves garlic

• ¼ tsp salt

• ¼ tsp MSG (味精)

and pound until pasty. Then add

• 1.5 tbsp soy sauce (生抽)

• 1 tbsp dark Chinese vinegar (陈醋/香醋)

• 2 tsp toasted sesame oil (麻油)

and quickly pound to mix. Break the six hard boiled eggs in half, add them to a mortar, and pound until the eggs have begun to break down and everything looks saucy.

Serve with steamed mantou buns (preferably), but again, a toasted bagel is pretty solid too.

Dai-Flavor Pounded Eggs (舂蛋)

This is another dish that’s almost a dead ringer for an egg salad, from the far south of the Yunnan province near the Laos border.

When it comes to staple grains, Dai cuisine traditionally centered things around sticky rice, ala neighboring Laos and North Thailand. And this dish is fantastic eaten with sticky rice — we were first introduced to the thing from a Dai lunch-counter which specialized in serving stuff alongside glutinous rice. That said, as we discussed in The En-Rice-ification of Yunnan (below), these days rice is the modern staple – and it’s quite good mixed in with rice as well.

The En-Rice-ification of Yunnan

This recipe will also make use of a mortar. Again, if you do not own a mortar, refer to the note at the end of the post.

Hard boil:

• Six eggs

as you like to hard boil eggs. We start ours in a pot with cold water and boil for eight minutes, then rinse under cool water and peel.

To a dry wok or pan, toast

• Two fresh spicy red chilis (小米辣) – poke a couple holes in the chili first to avoid explosion

• Four cloves garlic

• ~1 inch of ginger

over a medium-low flame for ~5 minutes until soft and blistered. Peel the garlic, slice the stem off the chili.

Chop into ~1cm sections:

• 15g cilantro (香菜)

• 15g culantro (大芫荽)¹

In a mortar, add the toasted garlic, chili, and ginger, together with

• ½ tsp salt

• ½ tsp MSG

and pound until pasty. Add

• 2 tsp toasted chili flakes (煳辣椒; Thai Prik Bon is a close substitute)²

and pound to mix. Break the boiled eggs in half into the mortar. Pound until the eggs are roughly half inch pieces, then add the cilantro and culantro. Quickly pound to mix.

Liangban Eggs (凉拌鸡蛋)

This recipe is admittedly straining the definition of ‘egg salad’, but we also wanted to include it as it’s… a little less esoteric of a dish than the previous two. It’s a popular homecooking dish over on the Chinese internet, and could be thought of as a ‘new cook dish’. It’s easy, tasty, and impressive looking.

Hard boil:

• Six eggs

as you like to hard boil eggs. We start ours in a pot with cold water and boil for eight minutes, then rinse under cool water and peel.

Slice the eggs into quarters with dental floss or a wet knife. Arrange neatly on a plate.

Slice:

• One spicy red chili (小米辣)

• 10g scallion

• 10g cilantro

and mix in a bowl with

• 2 tbsp soy sauce (生抽)

• 2 tsp dark Chinese vinegar (陈醋/香醋)

• 1 tsp oyster sauce (蚝油)

• ¼ tsp salt

• ½ tsp sugar

• ⅛ tsp MSG (味精)

• ⅛ tsp white pepper powder

• 1 tsp toasted sesame seeds

Then, in a small saucepan heat

• 1 tbsp oil

up until smoking, then splash over the sauce. Mix well.

Smother over the sliced eggs.

If you don’t own a mortar

For the northern garlic eggs, this shouldn’t be too much of an issue as it’s really only the garlic that needs to be broken down.

There’s a garlic mincing technique in western cooking whereby you sort of ‘grind’ chopped garlic with salt, in order to get a very pasty-looking end result. Gordon Ramsey has as reasonable of a tutorial as any:

Do this move with the salt quantity specified in the recipe. Once you’ve got some pasty garlic, mix it together with the MSG, soy sauce, vinegar, and sesame oil.

Then in a large mixing bowl, break your eggs in half and mix them together with the sauce. Wear some kitchen gloves (or Macguivered kitchen gloves), mixing and breaking the eggs down ala our pounded chicken post last week:

For the Dai-flavor eggs, you would need a food processor. Simply pulse together the toasted garlic, chili, and ginger together with the salt, MSG, and chili flakes. Mix this mixture together with the eggs and herbs ala the above video.

1. Swap the 15g culantro for an additional 15g cilantro if you cannot find culantro where you live.

2. Chipotle powder could also hit similar notes, but would be deeper/smokier. You could perhaps use a 50/50 blend of chipotle and another chili powder (e.g. cayenne pepper, gochugaru).