Taiwanese Oyster Omelette (蚵仔煎)

Taiwanese oyster omelette upclose 蚵仔煎 upclose

taiwanese oyster omelette 蚵仔煎2

I bought oysters the other day so that I can practice my shucking skills (or lack thereof), so I decided to make the famous Taiwanese street food oyster omelette 蚵仔煎.  It’s a shame I forgot to buy the sauce to go with it.  I also did not have any Taiwanese cabbage so I used lettuce instead.  Shucking was fun! I am still slow as hell, but I am improving, and come to think of it, I should buy another batch so I can continue working on this.

Recipe taken from Eupho Cafe

Ingredients (1 serving): 10-12 oysters, Taiwanese cabbage (小白菜) or some sort of lettuce greens, 2 eggs beaten, 6-7 tbsp corn starch, water, salt and pepper to taste

1. shuck oysters or clean them (if already shucked); chopped greens into bite-size pieces
2. mix corn starch with water so that you get an extremely gooey, cement-like paste (thicker than you would need it to thicken soup.
3. heat a saute pan over medium heat.  Add 1 tbsp of oil, then add about half of the oysters.
4. pour in half of the corn starch mixture and half of the egg mixture.
5. put the lettuce greens on top as the egg begins to form an omelette.
6. add the rest of the oysters, egg, corn starch mixture.  flip the omelette over for 1 minute before serving.
   

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Taiwanese Beef Noodle Soup 2-Way (蕃茄牛肉麵/ 紅燒牛肉麵)

Towards the end of 2008 I got a really awesome gift from my sister and brother-in-law Peggy and Terry.  It is a Fagor 3-in-1 Electric Multi-Cooker: an all-in-one pressure-cooker, slow-cooker, and rice-cooker.  I had been going back and forth over the benefits of owning a pressure cooker vs. slower cooker for the longest time and a multi-cooker seemd to be the perfect solution.  The Fagor multi-cooker had gotten some fairly good reviews on Amazon.com.  The only downside is that unlike stand-alone pressure cookers that can get pressure as high as 15 psi the Fagor pressure-cooking function only has 2 psi settings:  High (9 psi) and Low (5 psi).  What that essentially means (from my info digging on the web) is that it will not save as much time as the 15 psi and you need to adjust your cooking time accordingly.  At 9 psi, the Foger multi-cooker claims to cut down 70% of the cooking time from conventional stove-top cooking, but if you are working with a pressure cooker recipe (which is typically written to a 15 psi setting), then for your own planning purpose, you need to add about 40% to the estimated time stated on the recipe.  Finally, keep in mind that it takes about 20-30 minutes for the pressure cooker to build up enough pressure in the first place.

Anyway, the piece of appliance sat in the corner of my apartment while I freaked out about finals and then I put it to good use.  The first test? Taiwanese Beef Noodles 2-way.  I made a tomato-based beef noodle soup (蕃茄牛肉麵) with the pressure cooker function at high (9 psi) and it took an hour (1.5 hour total including prep time).  I also made a soy-based or braised beef noodle soup version  (紅燒牛肉麵) with the slow-cooker function — in that case I prepped all the materials and had it on overnight.

The tomato-based noodle soup was not as much of a success.  It turned out more like my mom’s tomato beef noodle soup, which was not what I was going for, but here’s a photo of it:

taiwanese tomato beef noodle soup

The braised /soy-sauced beef noodle soup, on the other hand, I liked alot.

taiwanese braised beef noodle soup

I am trying to locate the sheet of paper that I took notes on re recipe. Will update when located, in the meantime here’s the base recipe I worked off of.

The multi cooker worked miraculously and the beef tendons cooked down til they are soft and gooey, which made the soup thicker too probably due to the gelatin in the beef tendon (in the process of reading Harold McGee’s On Food and Cooking).

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