I promised myself that I will improve on the salted egg sauce from the earlier Salted Egg Crayfish recipe. For that recipe, I used salted egg yolks which were steamed and mashed, along with pumpkin puree, no additional liquid, and too much evaporated milk. The result? Too thick, creamy and buttery, and I couldn’t really taste the salted eggs nor feel its texture.
Yesterday, I decided to practise some more. I had suspected that steaming the egg yolks beforehand would take away some of the flavour and all of its texture, so I worked with raw yolks today. Instead of steaming, I cracked the egg yolks into a dish and tried as much as I could to mash them with a fork. Because raw salted egg yorks are firm, sticky and ‘gluey’, you’ll need to get a spoon ready to scrape them off the fork back into the dish, then repeat. You don’t have to spend a life time doing it – we’ll still need to break them up some more in the wok. Cooking the egg yolks directly in the wok without the extra step of steaming them = more salted egg flavour and a more sandy texture – the way it should be.