[Sca-cooks] Maybe OOP - Chinese Brown Sauce

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

Also sprach SEBD at aol.com:
>In a message dated 3/21/05 7:40:34 P.M. Eastern Standard Time, 
>adamantius.magister at verizon.net writes:
>
>The only one  I absolutely can't figure out is the mysterious brown
>goo some restaurants  and take-out places put on egg foo young (we just
>drizzle oyster sauce or dark  soy out of the bottle at home; it's 
>much better).
>___________
>
>Good thinking! Unfortunately, I learned to make it in my giddy youth.
>
>The impenetrable brown goo atop retro-style egg fu young is made  thusly:
>
>1 cup Chinese chicken broth
>1 T regular soy sauce
>1 T oyster sauce
>1 T cornstarch in four t water
>
>Boil the broth, stir in the seasonings, thicken with the cornstarch and 
>water.
>
>Drop this glop liberally onto the fried egg/veggie/meat or fish  pancake, let
>the whole mess congeal slightly, and serve.

Funny... when you order scrambled eggs with shrimp or pork on rice in 
one of the Cantonese greasy chopsticks in New York's Chinatown, it 
either comes drizzled with oyster sauce (the actual sauce, not a 
"gravy" made from it) or dark soy sauce (sometimes the flavorful dark 
soy previously used to cook things like soy sauce chicken). If the 
latter, it is drizzled around the edges of the eggs in the wok, 
forming a slightly liquid glaze.

What you're describing is a pretty typical stir-frying sauce at our 
house, although it seems like an awful lot of cornstarch (we do maybe 
2 tsp for a pint, and my wife complains about letting the Lo Fan 
--essentially, Americans-- in her kitchen).

The other sauce I described, the one that has that distinctively 
caramelized taste of dark roux, is something different. It's not even 
as dark as the other sauces we talked about; it may actually be based 
on dark roux, but I haven't encountered anyone who could verify or 
debunk that.

Adamantius

-- 




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