ChineseCookingDemystified
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Early Look: Three (Traditional) Chinese Egg Salads
🕑 Added 2025-03-14 03:54:12 +0000 UTCPictured is a humble Chinese dish called jidansuan (“Garlic Eggs”) from the North of the country, from around Henan, Shandong, and Northern Jiangsu.
Let’s call a spade a spade: it really looks like an egg salad sandwich. And that’s because, in some ways, it is an egg salad sandwich - depending on the strictness of the 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.
Now, we’ve talked at length about xiafancai (“over rice dishes”, “send the rice down dishes”) – dishes meant to be eaten with rice. But home kitchens in the North 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). Mantou bun regions are interesting in their potential applicability to the western kitchen as well... because what goes on a Mantou, in my opinion, also tends to work quite well working with bread (though a bagel might be a better match).
Besides that, we've also got for you in the video an herbaceous Yunnan Dai dish called chongdan (舂蛋) - excellent with sticky rice, as an aside - as well as a simple modern liangban sliced boiled egg that you can find throughout China.
Comments
Stephanie Li and Chris Thomas
I ended up chatting about this slightly in the Substack post. You wouldn't want to use a food processor for the egg, but it could be used (1) to make the garlic paste for the Northern sort and (2) to blend together the chilis/garlic/ginger/etc for the Yunnan one. That said, I do think it would just be easier to use the salt mincing trick for the garlic in the garlic eggs :)
Zhen Chun
Question: in the absence of a mortar & pestle, or available hands to mince: how does a food processor stack up with turning the egg in mince? Is it OK, or would the texture be wrong?
Stephanie Li and Chris Thomas
My parents have a number of chickens, they’re discovering new friends they never ever knew they had
Brad Foley
Here's me feeling smug that I have chickens in LA, and I can make all these dishes even in our eggcession
