For a foodie like me, one of the great joys in life is finding an exceptional recipe. Bonus points if the recipe is spot on in recreating a fond food memory. You know that kind of recipe, I’m sure. You make it. You taste it. And there is that Wow! moment when you know that the recipe is everything you want it to be.
This is such a recipe.
The original version of this recipe comes from Francis Lam. He is a former New York Times food writer and the current host of The Splendid Table. In a 2017 NY Times Magazine article, Lam wrote that this dish hits “every pleasure center in the brain.” Those words certainly caught my attention. After five months in Covid19 isolation, my pleasure centers are getting a little rusty.
Lam is a gifted food writer in addition to being an excellent cook. His magazine piece accompanying the recipe is a poignant essay on the son-of-immigrants experience–the frustration of being from a culture but not of it. The article is worth reading if you can pull it up on the NYT site. Here is a link: Francis Lam.
Here is an excerpt about Lam’s search for his mother’s Stir-Fried Tomatoes and Eggs recipe: “So I went online and found recipe after recipe, with an eye toward cobbling together my own. I read the cookbook author Genevieve Ko’s version and took from it the idea of just lightly cooking the eggs before finishing them in the tomatoes. I read Chichi Wang’s version, on Serious Eats, and lifted her brilliant use of fragrant rice wine in the eggs and ketchup in the sauce. I read dozens of blog posts, mostly relating the same story over and over again — a story of nostalgia, of Mom’s cooking, of home…. And after all this reading, I started to realize what I was really seeing: people, just like me, missing a knowledge that they felt should be in their bones, coming to someone else’s recipes to connect them to where they came from while being rooted in where they are.”
If Francis Lam intrigues you as he does me, here is a link to a Splendid Table video where he explains how to cut and peel and onion. (I confess that I hate peeling onions with a passion.) He has a gentle charm and a quirky sense of humor. Francis Lam explains how to peel an onion.
Here is the recipe.
Save RecipeIngredients
- 6 eggs
- Kosher salt
- 1/2 t. sesame oil
- 1 T. Shaoxing rice wine or dry sherry
- 1 t. cornstarch
- 1 t. sugar
- 2 T. ketchup
- 1 pound beefsteak tomatoes or 1 14.5-ounce can of diced tomatoes in juice (use the juice if you use canned tomatoes)
- 4 T. vegetable oil
- 3 scallions (sliced)
- 1 t. grated (or minced) ginger
- Steamed rice (for serving)
Instructions
- Break eggs into a mixing bowl and beat them well with 1 t. salt, sesame oil and rice wine or sherry. Set aside.
- Combine cornstarch and 2 T. water in a small bowl. Mix. Stir in the sugar and the ketchup. Set aside.
- Prepare tomatoes. The recipe calls for beefsteak tomatoes but I used plum tomatoes. I think beefsteak would be a better choice because they would be more juicy for the sauce, but, in a pinch, plum tomatoes worked fine.
- Heat a large non-stick or well-seasoned skillet over high heat with 3 T. vegetable oil. Reserving some for the garnish, add most of the sliced scallions to the pan and quickly stir fry the onions (about 20 seconds). Add the eggs to the hot pan and stir to cook them until they form large curds. This will take about a minute. You want the eggs to set but to still be a bit runny (they will cook fully in the last step of the recipe). Remove the pan from the heat and scrape the egg/onion mixture into a bowl. Set aside.
- Wipe the skillet and reheat it over high heat with 1 T. of vegetable oil. Stir-fry the minced ginger until it is aromatic. This will only take about 15 seconds. Don't let the ginger burn, so watch it carefully. Add the tomatoes to the pan cook them with the ginger for 2-3 minutes. Stir the tomato mixture while cooking. You want the tomatoes to soften and release their juices. You want the juices to begin to thicken.
- Reduce the heat in your skillet to medium and stir the cornstarch mixture into the tomatoes. Let the cornstarch mixture come to a boil and stir until the mixture begins to thicken. Taste and adjust seasonings (salt, sugar, ketchup) if necessary.
- Break the egg curds into large pieces in their bowl and add them to the skillet with the cornstarch mixture. Stir and cook for a few seconds to finish cooking the eggs.
- Serve with steamed rice and garnish with reserved sliced scallions.
- Cook's Note: The original recipe says this serves 2 to 3 persons. I successfully cut the recipe in half and had enough for two medium servings.
