WTF is... "Chinese Brown Sauce"?

The internet seems convinced that this is the 'Chinese Mother Sauce'. Are they correct?

• Jump to the Broccoli and Shrimp Recipe

• Jump to the Beef and Straw Mushroom Recipe

Within the American Chinese takeout universe, there seems to be this thing called… “brown sauce”.

For the unfamiliar, a quick google should fill you in. It’s – apparently – that stuff that’s smothered over your Egg Foo Young, the sauce that’s fried in with your beef and broccoli. There’s an absolute smorgasbord of English language recipes online for it, tons of blogs touting it as a ‘universal stir fry sauce’, the predictable cacophony of Redditors arguing over the most authentic preparations. The renowned Martin Yan refers to it as “the Chinese mother sauce”.

That’s if you poke around in English, that is.

The same search in Chinese? This so-called “brown sauce” is… nowhere to be found. No matter what permutation you try (棕/褐 for brown, 酱/汁 for sauce, etc), pretty much the thing you’ll be able to find will be centered around either British HP sauce or French Espagnole sauce. Digging through all our various Cantonese cookbooks – new ones, old ones, whatever – also yields a similar about of ‘nada’. For something that’s supposedly so universal, that’s pretty weird, right?

In the past, my base assumption was that Brown Sauce was a sort of collective misnomer: white America goes to a Chinese restaurant, sees some saucy brown stuff in their stir fry, slapdashedly refers to it as ‘brown sauce’. A Chinese diner might not refer to things in the same way… but that’s ok, right? Different cooking systems, different cultural touchstones.

But we can’t so easily write off Brown Sauce off as this sort of collective hallucination of white America – it’s not just newspapers and redditors that talk about the stuff, but American cooks and chefs as well. From Martin Yan’s Brown Sauce, to The Art of Cooking’s, to Bill’s from the renowned Woks of Life – I mean, these are some absolutely first rate Chinese American sources. If they all seem to agree on the ‘thing-ness’ of this universal brown sauce, they’re obviously not wrong.

And I mean, a lot of that classic takeout fare does tend to revolve around a certain set of Cantonese flavors. And if you took a peek back into one of those kitchens, at times you can see the chef reaching for something pre-made and… brown. It’s a thing.

So then, the questions naturally follow:

“what is this brown sauce?”

“how is it made?”

“does it exist in China too?”

To answer these and find our in-China equivalent, we will need to drill down though, and really think about what we mean when we’re talking about ‘sauce’. And to do that, it’s probably a little easier to start with what the internet seems to refer to as “Chinese white sauce” – an easier translation puzzle.

The Conundrum of Translating “Sauce”

Below is a picture of a Moo Goo Gai Pan, a dish that’s famously supposed to contain a “Chinese white sauce”:

You see chicken. You see mushrooms. You also see that everything’s good and coated and saucy. And that sauce is kind of… white. So, “white sauce”, right?

Maybe you could translate it that way, maybe not.

Forgive me for an ever so brief language lesson. At the risk of drastically simplifying things, in Chinese, you’ve got:

1. Jiang (酱). English, “sauce”. Generally speaking, jiangs tend to be components, intermediate products. Ground bean sauce? Ground bean jiang. Ketchup? Tomato jiang.

2. Zhi (汁). English, “sauce”. A similarly incredibly broad word, but the physical thing that’s on your plate after stir frying would be called a zhi. For example, sweet and sour sauce is called “Sugar-vinegar Zhi” (糖醋汁). If you take that aforementioned ketchup and fry it up with a bunch of other ingredients, it becomes Tomato Zhi (茄汁), and you can smother it over a pork chop at Chachaanteng.

So in a western context, most sauces are usually translated as ‘zhi’.

• Bechemel: Baizhi 白汁, ‘White sauce’.

• Hollandaise: Helanzhi 荷兰汁, ‘Holland sauce’.

• Gravy: Rouzhi 肉汁, ‘Meat sauce’.

The trouble with our Moo Goo Gai Pan is that while that saucy white stuff is a zhi, that zhi doesn’t really have a name. In an American context, it might be a little like talking about what goes in on the topping of a casserole – you can of course refer to the stuff as a “topping”, but there’s no one single casserole-topping recipe, and no American Escoffier has come about to create a structured system of casserole-toppings. It’s just… a topping. More of a concept, more of a technique than a singular ‘thing’.

Luckily however, the question of “ok fine, but what goes in the white sauce in my Moo Goo Gai Pan” does have a clear, relatively structured answer, and that’s…

The Qian Technique

Last Chinese terminology I’ll introduce, I swear – and I promise it’s pretty straightforward.

Qian (芡) refers to a technique to thicken a liquid with a slurry – verb form, gouqian (勾芡). It’s just as uncomplicated and straightforward as it sounds, pretty much exactly the same as what you’d see, like, a western pan sauce. You make a stir fry with a bit of liquid inside, drizzle in your starch/water mixture, and stir til thick. Fin.

For our Moo Goo Gai Pan, there’s a specific type of qian that it employs called a “Crystal Qian” (琉璃芡). All that means is that the liquid that you thickened was a seasoned stock and… not too much else. Here’s what that looks like in practice, via the excellent Art of Cooking:

So “Chinese White Sauce” could perhaps be thought of as a “Crystal Qian”… but it’s important to note again that unlike the word ‘sauce’, this is a technique. No diners in China are going around being like “mmm I can’t get me enough of this Crystal Qian” – if anything, they might say “the chef is able to control the qian very well” or more likely… not even really think about it much at all.

How to Make a “White Sauce” (i.e. employ a crystal qian)

So we’ll cover how to make this ‘white sauce’, but definitely note that for the most part it exists inseparable from the stir fry itself (though sometimes it can coat steamed dishes). It’s not something you can buy, it’s not something that a restaurant would batch prep or store.

Now, we’ll start things off with a ‘seasoned stock’, but in practice things can sometimes get a little more… seasoning than stock: chicken bouillon powder and MSG do a good bit of the heavy lifting. So if you felt like getting super fancy, a Cantonese superior stock could obviously work, but that’s far far from mandatory. You could use a simple whatever Chinese pork stock, some western-style chicken stock so long as it’s unroasted and not too heavily seasoned with herbs and such (some stock bought stocks in the west can get really… thyme-y), or even just use water.

Second, for the starch most of you will likely be carrying cornstarch in your cupboard. If at all possible, swap that for either potato or tapioca starch – these starches thicken better, are quicker to act, and hold longer after cooking. Cornstarch can work in a pinch, but is generally thought of as the least-good option for this sort of thing (great for deep frying coatings however).

Ingredients:

1. Seasoned stock. Again, for this you could use all stock or all water:

   pork -or- chicken stock, ½ cup;

   water, ½ cup;

   chicken bouillon powder (鸡粉), 1 tsp;

   sugar, ½ tsp;

   salt, ¼ tsp;

   MSG (味精), ¼ tsp.

2. Oil, lard preferably, 2 tbsp.

3. Aromatics:

   garlic, ~1 large clove, minced;

   ginger, ~1cm, minced.

4. Liaojiu a.k.a. Shaoxing wine (料酒/绍酒), 1 tbsp.

5. Slurry: starch (淀粉), 2.5 tsp; mixed with 2.5 tbsp water

Process:

Mix all the ingredients for the ‘seasoned stock’ in a bowl.

To a wok, first longyau – get it piping hot, shut off the heat, add in the oil – and give it a swirl to get a nice non-stick surface. Flame still off, add in the minced aromatics and tip the flame to medium-low. Fry until fragrant, ~30 seconds.

Up the flame to high. Swirl in the wine and give everything a quick mix. Add in the seasoned stock. Bring it up to a rapid boil, then down to a simmer. In a thin stream, drizzle the slurry in while stirring constantly. You should be looking for something slightly before spoon-coating-consistency, like so:

At this point, you could add whatever pre-cooked ingredients you’d be making for your specific stir fry. There’s also flexibility – you can also swap up the order of operations a bit (more on that in the notes at the end of the post).

So to bring that all together, let’s take a gander at one of my all time favorite Cantonese Banquet dishes, Broccoli and Shrimp.

Broccoli and Shrimp

Ingredients:

1. Broccoli, 400g.

2. For garnish (optional):

   red mild chili, 1 -or- red bell pepper, ½;

   carrot, ~1 inch.*  

3. Shrimp, shell-on, 800g

4. Sodium Carbonate (碱面) -or- Kansui Lye Water (枧水), ½ tsp

5. Marinade for the shrimp:

   salt, ¼ tsp;

   white pepper powder, ¼ tsp;

   liaojiu a.k.a. Shaoxing wine (料酒/绍酒), ¼ tsp;

   starch (淀粉), 1 tsp

6. For the broccoli blanching liquid:

   salt; 1 tsp;

   oil, ~1 tbsp

7. Aromatics:

   garlic, ~1 large clove, minced;

   ginger, ~1cm, minced.

8. Liaojiu a.k.a. Shaoxing Wine (料酒/绍酒), 1 tbsp

9. Seasoned stock: As discussed above.

   pork -or- chicken stock, ½ cup;

   water, ½ cup;

   chicken bouillon powder (鸡粉), 1 tsp;

   sugar, ½ tsp;

   salt, ¼ tsp;

   MSG (味精), ¼ tsp.

10. Slurry: starch (淀粉), 2.5 tsp; mixed with 2.5 tbsp water

11. Toasted sesame oil (麻油), 1 tsp. To finish.

Process:

Cut the broccoli into florets, and the florets in half. Mince the garlic and the ginger. Slice the (optional) mild chili/bell pepper into roughly 1 inch diamonds, and the (optional) carrot into ~3mm sheets.

To prepare the shrimp, the general approach here was ala our Shrimp: the Maximally Delicious Way video, if you’d like a visual on that.

Remove the shell and heads from the shrimp. Place in a bowl and mix in the ½ tsp sodium carbonate (or kan sui). Fill up with water right above the shrimp, let sit for 3-5 minutes. Then place the bowl in a sink under a thin stream of running water, and let it all rinse for 3-10 minutes. This process is to remove the slime of the shrimp and help it retain its pop when cooking.

After that time, transfer the shrimp to a kitchen towel and thoroughly pat dry. Then, butterfly the shrimp by slicing in from the back and opening the shrimp like a book – I personally like to remove the vein once the shrimp are butterflied. Give the shrimp a quick pat dry again with a paper towel, then transfer to a bowl. Add the “marinade for the shrimp”. Mix well.

To a wok (preferably), add in a few inches of oil – enough that you can submerge the shrimp (I use 1-1.5 cups, but you could theoretically work this with ½ cup). Over a high flame, heat the oil up until its rapidly bubbling around a pair of chopsticks, or about 165C. Dump the shrimp in and fry until they look visibly cooked, ~45 seconds. Add the pepper and the carrot and give everything a very brief mix. Remove it all, let the oil drain out, and set aside.

For the broccoli, fill a pot or wok up with water and bring to a boil. Add in ~1 tsp salt (to season) and ~1/2 tbsp oil (for sheen). Add the broccoli and cook until it’s deepened in color, ~1 minute. Remove, and drain. Arrange the broccoli on a serving plate in a circle with the florets placed outwards.

To do the crystal qian, in a wok (preferably) first longyau – get it piping hot, shut off the heat, add in the oil – here, ~2 tbsp (I used lard) – and give it a swirl to get a nice non-stick surface. Flame still off, add in the minced aromatics and tip the flame to medium-low. Fry until fragrant, ~30 seconds.

Up the flame to high. Swirl in the wine and give everything a quick mix. Add in the “Seasoned Stock”. Bring it up to a rapid boil, then down to a simmer. In a thin stream, drizzle the slurry in while stirring constantly. The goal is a shade before spoon-coating consistency – add more starch if you’re not at that point.

Add the shrimp, carrot and peppers. Mix everything well with the sauce. Drizzle in the toasted sesame oil, mix, and toss on the broccoli.

Brown Sauce

Okay. So then “Chinese white sauce” is literally just stock that’s seasoned and thickened with a slurry. So then… what about brown sauce?

There is, of course, plenty of ‘brown-ish’ stir-fries that’re thickened in the same way – probably too many to count – cross crossing a whole smorgasbord of various flavor profiles. But that’s not what Martin Yan or Woks of Life are referring to in their recipes: they’re talking about this thing that restaurants mix in advance and use as ‘mother sauce’ for various dishes.

Which, of course, certainly exists in China too – it’s called tiáo wèi jiàng yóu (调味酱油), i.e. “seasoned soy sauce”.

You see, if you cook Chinese food quite a bit, you’ll often find yourself reaching for a bunch of ingredients over and over: soy sauce, Shaoxing wine, salt, sugar, MSG, maybe oyster sauce, maybe stock… whatever. Chinese restaurants, meanwhile, are highly efficient operations built from the ground up to save time (the real primary purpose of those high output restaurant burners, as an aside). For dishes that have overlap or are common across your menu, one time-saving trick is to pre-mix those oft-repeated components. A very clear example of the practice is seasoned soy sauce for seafood (i.e. the stuff drizzled over a Cantonese steamed fish), which’s almost always pre-mixed and is actually that you can just buy.

So a seasoned soy sauce is that so-called “mother sauce” that your takeout restaurant is reaching for. But different restaurants are… different, and have different needs. A Sichuan noodle vendor’s seasoned soy sauce could be steeped with spices. A Chuka restaurant in Japan might include gyofun and ketchup.

One possible Cantonese Seasoned Soy Sauce

And of course, plenty of restaurants don’t employ a seasoned soy sauce in their kitchen. And when it comes to home cooks in China? It’d be extremely rare to see.

We don’t use one, and I don’t think it’s something that’s all that relevant for most home cooks. But still, as the enduring popularity of pre-mixed “stir fry sauces” in the anglosphere proves, there’s certainly a sub category of people that the mise makes sense for. So if you want? Go for it.

Quick note that I designed this seasoned soy sauce in order to be used directly in the following recipe. If you were a restaurant, you’d likely want to reduce this down to concentrate the flavors – if you’d like to used this roughly akin to how you’d season with soy sauce, let it boil and reduce by half.

Ingredients:

1. Dried Shiitake Mushroom (冬菇), 1.

2. Water, 1 cup.

3. Ginger, 1 inch. Smashed.

4. Scallion, 1 sprig. Tied in a knot.

5. Soy sauce (生抽), 4 tsp.

6. Oyster sauce (蚝油), 1 tbsp.

7. Liaojiu a.k.a. Shaoxing wine (料酒/绍酒), 1 tbsp

8. Dry Seasoning:

   Sugar, 1 tsp;

   Chicken Bouillon Powder (鸡粉), ¼ tsp;

   Salt, 1/8 tsp;

   MSG (味精), 1/8 tsp.*

Process:

Soak the shiitake in cool water overnight (or alternatively, in hot boiled water for ~30 minutes). Squeeze the liquid from the shiitake, then strain the soaking liquid into a pot. Snip the shiitake with scissors into the pot, and then also toss in the ginger and scallion.

Bring everything up to a boil, then down to a simmer. Cover, and let everything infuse over a low flame for ~15 minutes.

After that time, shut off the heat and remove the mushroom and the aromatics – placing them in a bowl to let them cool down. Add in all your other seasoning and mix. Once the mushroom and aromatics are cool enough to handle, squeeze every last drop into the pot of now-seasoned soy sauce and discard. Bring everything up to a boil once last time, and reserve.

This should yield you roughly ¾ cup of seasoned soy sauce. If using for the following recipe, supplement with water if it reduced beyond that point.

How to Make “Brown Sauce” – i.e. a seasoned soy sauce thickened with a Qian

I do think that there might still be a miscommunication here. When I’ve seen Martin Yan or Art of Cooking discuss ‘brown sauce’, what they’re referring to is a seasoned soy sauce like the one above.

When I see people on Reddit inquiring about brown sauce, they seem to be talking about the final sauce that’s, say, smothered over their Egg Foo Young.

These are, again, two different things.

Like, you can obviously use a seasoned soy sauce in plenty of dishes, beyond just stuff that has a ‘gravy-like’ consistency (e.g. the seasoned soy sauce for seafood like the one discussed above). And you also certainly don’t need a pre-prepared seasoned soy sauce to make something like that ‘gravy’ for Egg Foo Young (plenty of restaurants will also opt for a step-by-step approach).

So it’s a hard to give a recipe for ‘brown sauce’ like we did for ‘white sauce’, because there’s nothing universal here. Of course, I can already here some echos of “shut up Chris, enough with your prefacing, just give me something that I could use to hit the brown-sauce-sized hole in my gullet”. And to that end, what you could do is:

1. Fry up some aromatics (any combination of garlic/ginger/scallion whites that makes sense)

2. Swirl in some Shaoxing wine

3. Add in that seasoned soy sauce from above

4. Thicken with a slurry, just like the crystal qian above.

If in the context of a stir fry, again, your order-of-operations is sort of up to you – you could add in your other ingredients pre-thickening, or post. As an example, you could take a look at Beef and Broccoli, which’s probably the obvious choice:

• Our recipe on the topic.

• Art of Cooking’s recipe

Let’s change it up though and show you another possible application:

Beef and Straw mushrooms, served over rice noodles

Beef and Straw mushrooms (草菇牛肉) is a classic Cantonese stir fry that can take on a few different forms. I wanted to show something saucier here, so I significantly increased the water quantity from what we’d usually do (in order to get something a bit closer to what folks might imagine from a “brown sauce heavy” dish). When things are that saucy though, they’re just crying to be smothered over rice noodles, so that’s the general route I went with here.

Ingredients:

1. Beef, 250g. Loin, flank, or top round.

2. Marinade for the beef. Note that the other half of our egg white below will go with the eggs when frying the rice noodles:

   salt, ¼ tsp;

   sugar, ½ tsp;

   soy sauce (生抽), ¼ tsp;

   dark soy sauce (老抽), ¼ tsp;

   liaojiu a.k.a. Shaoxing wine (料酒/绍酒), ½ tsp;

   oyster sauce (蚝油), 1 tsp;

   white -or- black pepper, 1/8 tsp;

   sodium carbonate -or- Kan sui, ¼ tsp (preferably) -or- baking soda, ½ tsp;

   starch (淀粉), 1 tsp;

   water, 3 tbsp;

   egg white, ½ egg;

   oil, 1 tbsp.

3. Straw mushrooms (草菇) -or- Shiitake mushrooms (香菇) -or- whatever mushrooms, 250g.

4. For the mushroom blanching liquid:

   salt; 1 tsp;

   oil, ~1 tbsp

5. Fresh Pad See Ew noodles, 500g. I used fresh Pad See Ew noodles because we live in Thailand – this was what I tested. Fresh Hor Fun would have been better, and preferred. If using Dried Hor Fun, use ~300g.

6. Egg, 2. One full egg plus what was leftover from the marinade.

7. Beansprouts, ~50g.

8. Seasoning for the rice noodles. This mix is a little water-heavy because Pad See Ew noodles are difficult to coat evenly:

   soy sauce (生抽), 1 tsp;

   salt, 1/8 tsp;

   sugar, 1/8 tsp;

   water, 2 tbsp.

9. Ginger, ~1 inch.* Smashed.

10. Scallions, 2. White and green portions separated, both cut into ~1.5 inch sections

11. Seasoned soy sauce from above. See the note below if you don’t want to make a separate seasoned soy sauce.

12. Slurry: 2.5 tsp starch mixed with 2 tbsp water.

13. Toasted sesame oil (麻油), ~1 tsp. To finish.

14. White -or- black pepper powder, ¼ tsp.* To finish.

Note: if you don’t feel like going through the whole song and dance of making a seasoned soy sauce, simply soak a shiitake as above. Once you get to the final stir fry, add the shiitake soaking liquid instead of the seasoned soy sauce. Add in all the ingredients from the seasoned soy sauce recipe minus the aromatics, and then continue on with this recipe.

Process:

Smash the ginger. Separate the scallions into the whites and greens, cutting each into ~1.5 inch sections. If your straw mushrooms are small, halve them; if they’re large or you’re using shiitakes, slice into ~1cm sheets.

Thinly slice the beef into 2-3mm sheets. Add all the ingredients for the marinade except the oil and mix very well, making sure the water is absorbed into the beef. Add the oil and mix to coat. Set aside for 10-15 minutes to allow the alkaline to tenderize the beef.

Add the salt and oil to a pot of water. Boil the mushrooms until cooked, ~2 minutes. Reserve.

To a wok (preferably), add in a few inches of oil – enough that you can submerge the beef (I use 1-1.5 cups, but you could theoretically work this with ½ cup). Over a high flame, heat the oil up until its rapidly bubbling around a pair of chopsticks, or about 165C. Dump the beef in and fry until it looks visibly cooked, ~45 seconds. Remove, let the oil drain out, and set aside.

Next, frying up some rice noodles. Do this however you’re comfortable. But for me, first I loosened up the rice noodles and set them on a plate. Then, to a wok with the flame on maximum, after a quick longyau with ~2 tbsp oil, I tossed in the beaten eggs. Once they’re good and scrambled, I went in with the Pad See Ew noodles. Pad See Ew noodles love to clump, so if you’re going that route too be sure to continuously spread the noodles outward from the center of the wok. Once the noodles have just *barely* started to brown (1-2 minutes), flip and continue with the other side. Then swirl the liquid seasoning in, continuously mixing and spreading the noodles to avoid clumping. Add in the beansprouts, stir fry for ~30 seconds. Move over to a plate.

Scrape out the wok, and longyau again – again, ~2 tbsp oil. Over a high flame, fry the ginger and scallion until fragrant, ~15 seconds, then swirl in the wine. After a quick mix, go in with the seasoned soy sauce. Bring it up to a boil and then down to a simmer, then drizzle in the slurry while stirring constantly. Add in the beef and mushrooms, mix well. Finish with the toasted sesame oil and white (or black) pepper, and smother it all over the stir fried rice noodles.

Note on Order of Operations

You’ve got three choices on when to add your pre-cooked ingredients back to the final stir fry:

1. After you fry the aromatics and swirl in the wine, before adding the liquid. The advantage of adding the ingredients at this stage is that you can give the ingredients a brief stir fry – they’ll take on the subsequent flavors a touch better.

2. After you add the liquid, before you thicken. Less common, but will give the ingredients a change to mingle with the liquid before thickening.

3. After you thicken. Allows you to most clearly see the stage of the sauce and how thick it is before mixing.

In almost all of our recipes, we opt for the first choice. In these recipes I went with the last one in order to most clearly show the qian technique.

But you can also add different ingredients at different times. Maybe you want to add the beef after the aromatics (to give it a bit of a stir fry, or perhaps a chance to mix with some sizzling soy sauce seared against the side of the wok), and the mushrooms at the very end (as mushrooms really love to leech water and mess up the final sauce consistency).