Why hello there, and welcome to a surprising Friday feature here at Kitchen Catastrophe. I’m your strung-out but still-kickin’ conductor Jon O’Guin, here to derail Egg Week with a dish that is half lies, and several bad decisions, and one that’s small, fun, and hopefully a little easier. You can, of course, skip my wise words with this link to get to the recipes, but for everyone else, let’s talk Eggs.  

A Weird Detour to Iceland to Assimilate

So, Egg Rolls. I know them, you know them. They’re classic Chinese food.

You know it, I know it.

Which is a funny thing to say, because China 100 years ago would have no idea what the fuck that picture just now was of. THAT’S right, suckers, Egg Rolls, as far as most historians can tell, did NOT come from China. Instead, the dish falls into an offshoot of what Soleil Ho calls “Assimilation Food”, which is a quasi-fusion cuisne, that’s best explained by example for my American readers: let’s say you get a fantastic job in Iceland. Beautiful country, lots of fun. But, fun fact about Iceland: they haven’t had McDonald’s there for over 10 years. And there are, by my short amount of Google searching, roughly 11 Mexican restaurants in the entire nation. So when you get homesick for the tastes of America, you’re going to have to adapt to what you can get IN Iceland, which, because of the different supplies and options, will quite possibly make something that’s not quite right to either country.

As a very weird example that is probably very easy to disprove, 10 minutes of me hunting Icelandic grocery stores for online shopping, and Google-translating pages, found me the “fact” that Hagkaup, a relatively upscale line of Icelandic grocery stores, doesn’t have any Cream of Chicken or Cream of Mushroom soup. (it does have one soup whose name refuses to translate, but there’s no mushrooms in the ingredients, which DO translate, and it might be a version of Leek and Potato, as one attempt at translating it got me “purr onion soup”, and it does have potatoes in the ingredients…) Which would make it pretty hard to make, say, classic Midwest Hotdish, as would the relative scarcity of beef. So an attempt to make that recipe there might rely on ground lamb, sauced with either Asparagus soup, or Cream sauce for meatballs, and pre-made fries, or pre-made Rosti. The result would be something weird and new.

Rosti, since I may have just dropped that word with absolutely no context, is like a Swiss version of Hashbrown: shredded potatoes with a bunch of butter. You can put a bunch of stuff in them like Cheese, Ham, whatever.

It Keeps Rollin’ Rollin’ Rollin’ Rollin’ WHAT

This happens ALL THE TIME to immigrants, especially coming to America. Dishes and flavors from your homeland can be hard to source here (or rather, were, before the existence of Amazon), so you make the closest you can with what you have. Or you scale UP what you’re used to, to accommodate new bounties in your home. We’ve talked about this before, with Chicken Parmigiana, Corned Beef, and Spaghetti and Meatballs: all dishes invented IN AMERICA to mirror foods from ‘the old country’ with new ingredients and plenty. The same is HUGELY true of Chinese food. (I actually failed to cover a great documentary about the topic, “The Search for General Tso” because it was removed from Netflix not too long after I watched it)

Egg Foo Young? American. (Technically. We’ll cover it later.)

 Chop Suey? Same thing. (There’s a Cantonese dish the name is borrowed from, but it has been heavily Americanized)

Fortune Cookies? Invented in San Francisco.

The egg roll is one of many such creations. China has SIMILAR foods, such as the Spring Roll, but…well, anyone who’s had a Spring Roll and an Egg Roll is willing to admit they’re different. For those who DON’T know, THIS is a spring roll:

These are Vietnamese spring rolls, but they’re pretty close.

They’re smaller, often maybe ¾ of an inch wide, and 3 or so inches long, while an Egg Roll is often 6 inches long, and 2 inches wide. The wrapper is thinner and fries for shorter, meaning it browns much less aggressively.

The exact history of egg rolls is a little hard to pin down, with the first recipe that looks like what we’d recognize showing up in New York in the 30’s. The first “egg roll” recipe found in America EVER is rather different, being basically a thin omelette rolled with a meat and veggie filling, a little like a Swiss Roll of Egg.

Switzerland keeps coming into this discussion of China. And THIS is Korean, so it’s just a mess.

The standard Egg Roll recipe is, even MORE paradoxically, made without egg these days. IT USED to be: the dough used to make Egg Roll wrappers used to include egg, which is where people think the name arose from, to specify the thicker wrapper. However, the newly automated recipes often DON’T use eggs. The wrappers I’m using are actually Vegan.

Speaking of how it’s made, we’ve really kind of mined the history of the dish as much as we could, so let’s instead get to making these suckers, so we have room for the EVER MYSTERIOUS EGG-FOLD, THAT I AM DEFINITELY NOT STALLING FOR BECAUSE WE EMPTIED OUT THE FRIDGE AND I NO LONGER HAVE SOME OF MY INGREDIENTS.

Roll up in the Caddy

This recipe is the “Easy Egg Roll” recipe from Cook’s Country, which is, theoretically, a fairly simple recipe, other than a somewhat onerous mise-en-place. If you’ve forgotten your culinary French, that means there’s a fair bit of a set-up. Specifically, you gotta chop up a LOT of veggies. Slicing a bunch of scallions, mincing or grating garlic, peeling and grating ginger, stemming and chopping shitake mushrooms…The process of prepping the veggies for our egg rolls took sufficiently long enough that Nate literally made Kraft Macaroni and Cheese, beginning to end, by the time it was done.

It was an inspiring amount of progress.

This process is such a pain that the recipe actively avoids some of it, by using a pre-made coleslaw mix instead of having you cut up carrots and cabbage as well. Once your veggies are prepped, you’re through the intensive part. You really just have to brown some pork and cook the veggies for a while. I personally added the mushrooms much earlier into the pan than the recipe called for, because I liked my mushrooms cooked down a little more, and it’s functionally impossible to overcook them. I basically just browned the pork for about 3 minutes, then added the mushrooms. Another 3 minutes, and you add in the scallion whites, minced garlic, and ginger, and cook for another minute to get the garlic and ginger aromatic.

 Now it’s time for some flavors along with coleslaw mix. You want some soy sauce, sugar, and vinegar. OR, you can be a rad foodie and rely on the sweet and funky Black Vinegar. The original recipe actually moved away from Black vinegar, to a mixture of soy sauce, white vinegar, and sugar. Hilariously, a mere hour or two before I started the recipe, I poured all my white vinegar on a car battery, so bougie food cred time it was!

My cred is re-established.

Soften up your cabbage for 3-5 minutes, and your filling is COMPLETE

Wait, did I say complete? That was a lie. You gotta add 2 teaspoons of sesame oil and the greens of the scallions off-heat. I added a little extra sesame oil, because…well because it was a hot day, I’d just spent 20 minutes cutting veggies, and I was a little under the weather. So I just eyeballed it, and I think I may have accidentally doubled it. (The second time I did that this week, weirdly.)  Anyway, NOW your filling is COMPLETE!

Behold your monstrosity.

Now you gotta cool the mixture off a little, which the recipe suggests you do by refrigerating the mixture for 5 minutes. I personally just waited for 15 minutes and ate the Mac and Cheese that Nate had made. Then came the rolling process. Which was honestly easier than I anticipated. You start with the wrapper in a diamond layout relative to the edge fo the counter: ie, pointing one of the corners at you.

The difficulty I ran into here was that the delicate wrappers tended to tear a little as I peeled them off the stack, but as long as it was only about an inch or so , it really isn’t that much of a problem, since you’re going to roll one tip up pretty tightly, so you just make that part the tucked-in edge. Also…well, we’ll get to that.

This is one of MANY torn corners I just rolled up to hide my shame.

In the meantime, spread a bit of water along all the edges of the wrapper, and put 1/3 of a cup of the filling on the wrapper, forming it into a rough cylinder. Then take the bottom corner, and tuck it over the filling.

It’s like, as you do it, it becomes obvious this is how they’re done.

Then take the outside edges and fold them over the ends of the filling. I personally found tucking the corners closed off any gaps. Then just straight up roll the tube away from yourself, until the final corner is pressed to the top of the roll, a process I did not photograph, because my hands were occupied.

Now, you could fry these pretty much immediately, or freeze them and fry for an extra 1 minute per side later, OR you can refrigerate these for up to 24 hours! Or you can be an idiot like me, and leave them in the fridge for around 42 hours, because Nate offered to get McDonald’s when I should have fried these. Was this a problem? Probably!

As in “This is probably going to end poorly”.

By the time I got around to frying my egg rolls, they had leaked liquid onto each other and the plate they were refrigerated on, heavily weakening the wrapper on several of the egg rolls, resulting in the tears there. As such, of the 10 egg rolls I made, we ended up tossing out 4 of them without even trying to fry them.

However, two of the egg rolls did fine, because of early laziness. See, I was having a problem where my egg roll wrappers REALLY wanted to stick to another wrapper, leaving me with double-thick wrappers. I pried MOST of these apart, but that lead to more tearing. So of the 10, I intentionally double-wrapped two of them, to see if I could minimize my workload without too negative effects.

The answer is that, well, the two double-wrapped ones had no tears, and actually fried the MOST like a “normal” egg roll.

Can you guess which two they are?

Now, granted, that’s probably at least partly my fault for making the other wrappers wait too long and soak up more fluid, but they definitely looked the best and had the least issues while frying (some of the thinner ones puffed up the non-frying portion, creating a weird bubble situation.)

The results were…surprisingly fine. Like, again, I left these in the fridge TWICE as long as they were supposed to be, changed out ingredients, mis-eyeballed one, and generally mucked it up. And Nate classified it as  either “unremarkable” or “satisfactory”. They were fine. Made CORRECTLY, I bet they’d be great.

So, what about that Egg Fold?

Jon John Jian

The “egg fold” that I keep referring to is a take on Jian bing or jianbing, based on a walk through from J. Kenji Lopez-Alt from several months ago. Jianbing is a Chinese street food, often a breakfast “sandwich”, which consists of…a lot of stuff. The story goes that back during the Three Kingdoms era, Zhuge Liang (who we’ve discussed before)’s army ran out of food in the desert, and he intstructed them to make a thin batter and cook it on their shields over the fire.

The result is, basically, the Chinese equivalent of a French-style Crepe. The name, jianbing, technically means “fried/Strong bread”, and explaining the concept is both kind of difficult, and very easy: it’s a quickly cooked flat-bread stuffed with protein, sauces, spices, and vegetables. It can be made with different batters, different levels of spice. It’s basically the bastard child of a breakfast burrito and a quesadilla.

The visual really locks that comparison in.

My version comes, as I noted, from J. Kenji Lopez-Alt, a guy we’ve actually referenced twice in the last month or so, as he developed the Reverse-Sear method for America’s Test Kitchen while he worked there, and since the stay-at-home order has begun, he’s been churning out at least one video a day of him making some dish either from his home or his restaurant (which has been cooking to support a free meal fund for the area). He has definitely spiked up my list of “chefs to check out” and I may look into getting his cookbook and trying some stuff from it soon.

This specific recipe comes from a 2-minute video that…honestly isn’t that far off: I’m pretty sure from start to finish, my version of the recipe took MAYBE 7 minutes. You thinly slice one scallion, then a couple small chiles (I was going to do one small jalapeño, but changed my mind and used some frozen Thai Bird’s Eye we have instead at the last second, because I didn’t want to figure out what to do with the rest of the jalapeño), as well as chopping up some cilantro. (I used parley instead, since Nate can’t eat cilantro, so we tend to avoid it.)

A messy mise-en-place.

Veggies chopped, the next step was to get some oil warmed up in a pan (which, yes, I did start while I was chopping) before tossing in the scallion whites and the sliced chiles. While those fry up a little, I took the time to prep the rest of the ingredients: I tore open our new container of hoisin sauce, since we threw ours away last night as part of a 3 week “purge the fridge of expired things” initiative. I popped down a jar of chili oil, since I like spicy food. And I beat up a single egg with the chopped parsley and scallion greens. Then came the fun part, and one that will be somewhat familiar to readers of Monday’s post, which served as the inspiration to cover this now: you pour the egg into the pan, spread it so it covers most of the pan thinly, and then press a tortilla straight onto the wet top of the eggs.

MORE WEIGHT.

That’s right, we’re adhering the omelette to the tortilla, just like we did with the Roti John, just reversing what part we’re cooking first. (Which technically means, if you wanted a less finicky system, you could easily dump the Roti john eggs into the hot skillet, and press the loaves onto them.) After maybe a minute of cooking, flip the whole shebang in the pan, and let the tortilla crisp up a bit while you add to the insides. And this is where you can go buck wild (well, technically you could have sooner, too) but like, this is just going to get folded in on itself and served, so you could crumble cooked bacon on this, or tear up some ham. You could sprinkle some crushed tortilla chips or wonton strips for texture. There’s a popular version of this in China which adds yuotiao, basically the Chinese version of a donut/churro. I personally drizzled (a little too much) chili oil, and a couple squirts of hoisin, since that’s what Kenji did.

I only just now realized I made the sauce into a triangle. Or is it…A PYRAMID?
That’s right, Jon O’Guin, Illuminati. This is what holding the reins of power in this world gets you.

Brush the sauce out, and fold the sucker up! First in half, and then in half AGAIN, so you have a stacked fan of quarters.

Not like, the coin, but like, half of a half.

Now, I screwed this guy up in a couple little ways: I used a small egg, I didn’t let the tortilla crisp as much as I could, there was a little too much chili oil (or, rather, it was a little too condensed in the middle of the thing. So I want you take that all into account when I tell you this was the best thing I ate all week. Now, in the interest of honestly, the Roti John was pretty close, but this little thing beat EVERY meal I’d eaten in the last seven days, and maybe longer. There was just something amazing about biting through the layers of soft egg and not-quite-crisp tortilla, the heat of the chiles and chili oil, and the touch of sweetness. Like, I maybe needed a teaspoon more hoisin, and another 20-30 seconds on the tortilla side, but in terms of effort to results, this is the best thing I’ve made in months.   I HEARTILY recommend trying it, and experimenting to find a version that clicks with you. Because… seriously, one egg, one tortilla, some veggies and sauce, and I was blown away.  I don’t have Nate’s opinion on it yet, but I’ll likely try a fresh batch this evening when our mother gets home, with a little more customization, and if we do, I’ll report back the results.

MONDAY: DID I SAY WE WERE DOING A VEGAN WEEK? SCREW THAT. I REMEMBERED I HAVE SOMETHING THAT MIGHT EXPIRE IF I DON”T MAKE IT SOON. SO YOU CAN FIND ME IN ST LOUIS, MAKING ST PAUL. THAT WILL MAKE SENSE LATER

WEDNESDAY: I HAVE NO IDEA.

Recipes

Easy Egg Roll, Mostly Cook’s Country

Makes…Apparently 8 egg rolls? I made 10. Shit.

Ingredients

8 ounces ground pork

6 scallions, white and green parts sliced thin while separated

3 garlic cloves, minced

2 teaspoons grated fresh ginger

3 cups (7 ounces) coleslaw mix

4 ounces shiitake mushrooms, stemmed and chopped

3 tablespoons soy sauce

1 tablespoon sugar

1 tablespoon distilled white vinegar
(You can use Black vinegar instead: if so, replace one of the tablespoons of soy sauce with an extra tablespoon of vinegar, and reduce the amount of sugar to 1 teaspoon.)

2 teaspoons toasted sesame oil

8 egg roll wrappers

2 cups vegetable oil 

Preparation

1. Cook pork in 12-inch nonstick skillet over medium-high heat until no longer pink, breaking up meat with spoon. After 3 minutes, add mushrooms, and cook an additional 3 minutes. Add scallion whites, garlic, and ginger and cook until fragrant, about 1 minute. Add coleslaw mix, soy sauce, sugar, and vinegar and cook until cabbage is just softened, about 3 minutes.

2. Off the heat, stir in sesame oil and scallion greens. Transfer pork mixture to large plate, spread into even layer, and refrigerate until cool enough to handle, about 5 minutes. Wipe skillet clean with paper towels.

3. Fill small bowl with water. Working with 1 egg roll wrapper at a time, orient wrappers on counter so 1 corner points toward you. Place lightly packed ⅓ cup filling on lower half of wrapper and mold it with your fingers into neat cylindrical shape. Using your fingertips, moisten entire border of wrapper with thin film of water.

4. Fold the bottom corner of the wrapper up and over the filling and press it down on other side. Fold both side corners of wrapper in over filling and press gently to seal. Roll filling up over itself until wrapper is fully sealed. Leave egg roll seam side down on counter and cover with damp paper towel while shaping remaining egg rolls.

5. Line a large plate with triple layer of paper towels. Heat vegetable oil in now-empty skillet over medium heat to 325 degrees. Using tongs, place all egg rolls in skillet, seam side down, and cook until golden brown, 2 to 4 minutes per side. Transfer to prepared plate and let cool slightly, about 5 minutes. Serve.

TO MAKE AHEAD: At end of step 4, transfer egg rolls to parchment paper–lined plate, wrap tightly in plastic wrap, and refrigerate for up to 24 hours. Alternatively, freeze egg rolls on plate, then transfer to zipper-lock bag and freeze for up to 1 month. Do not thaw before cooking; increase cooking time by about 1 minute per side. 

“Egg Fold” Jianbing

Serves 1

Ingredients

1 tbsp olive oil

1 large egg

1 scallion, thinly sliced, white and greens separated

1 tbsp parsley, cilantro, or other herb, chopped

1 tsp chopped chiles (optional)

1 6-8” flour tortilla

1 tbsp hoisin sauce

1 tsp chili oil

Additional toppings/fillings, as desired.

Preparation

1. Heat olive oil in a small (roughly 8-10 inch) skillet over medium heat. As oil heats, beat together scallion greens, egg, and chopped herbs (or other toppings you’d like integrated into the eggs)

2. Once the oil is heated, add the scallion whites and chiles to the oil, and cook for 1-2 minutes. Pour over egg and herb mixture, tilting pan to spread egg as widely in pan as possible. Let cook 30 seconds or so, before pressing tortilla on top, and cooking an additional 30-45 seconds, before flipping.

3. Once flipped, brush exposed egg with hoisin sauce and chili oil, and sprinkle with desired toppings. Let cook 1 minute, then fold tortilla closed, and fold into quarters. Serve warm.