UPDATE Sept 28, 2015: A fellow Singaporean in Michigan just gave me a better recipe for the flour part of this dish. Please see updates in red below.
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Oyster omelette in Singapore's hawker center are oily, heart-clogging gems. Many cook it but only a few do it well. While I've had oyster omelette on many occasions, often, my mind wanders back to school time in Hwa Chong Junior College.
Some of my closest friends were in the school band and every school day and most weekends, we'll be playing or studying together in the "band corner", a few tables and benches just outside of the room where we store our musical instruments. Dinners and suppers were often part of it, and a very good friend, Xiao Hongquan, and I would sometimes share a plate of oyster omelette when we're at the hawker center. I can't remember for health or budget reason; I only knew that we both enjoyed that dish.
Fast forward to recent years, my younger sisters and Leon, deciding that this dish was bad for my health, put a stop to my eating it often, amongst other dishes (like kway chap - pig's intestines etc cooked in brooth and eaten with flat rice noodles; kway teow - wok fried flat and yellow noodles cooked with cockles and pork lard; and laksa - coconut curry noodles again with cockles, fish cakes and other good stuff).
Of course this dish isn't available in Midland. You can't find it in the Great Lakes Bay Region, and I'm sure not within a 2-hour drive time radius, which is as far as we would probably drive in a day to eat something.
I searched online for a good recipe and here's an amalgamated version I tried last night, and which turned out ok lah.
Ingredients
Fresh shucked oysters - either loose and sold by weight or sometimes in little tubs
3 eggs
A few dashes of Thai fish sauce
A dash of chinese cooking wine
White ground pepper - surprisingly hard to find around here as well
Some chopped fresh garlic - none of those minced-garlic-in-a-jar stuff; doesn't taste as good
Cilantro and thinly sliced spring onions
1 tablespoon rice flour
3 tablespoons tapioca starch
1 tablespoon corn starch
1/2 cup of warm water
1. Rinse oysters in water, set aside
2. Crack 3 eggs in a bowl, beat them, and set aside
3. Mix rice flour, tapiocacorn starch and water in a bowl, and set aside
4. Heat up a large non-stick frying pan with some oil, maybe about 2 tablespoon or so - eyeball it.
5. Stir flour solution again (because the powder would have settled), and once pan is hot, pour it in.
6. Don't mess with it no matter how tempting. When the flour is transcluent (i.e. no longer pure white), pour beaten eggs over it. Add a dash of fish sauce.
7. Let eggs cook for a while on medium heat until a bit brown.
8. Make like a hawker and start going at the flour and egg mixture cutting them into smaller pieces with a lot noise. The eggs should be a bit brown and the flour mixture should be a bit crispy by now.
9. Push them to one side of the pan.
10. Add a bit of oil and add in garlic. Fry it a little and add a dash of chinese cooking wine.
11. Strain away the water from the oysters and add them in on top of the garlic. Lightly fry the oysters a little to warm them through. Those things expel water as you cook them so if your oysters are huge and the pan can't evaporate the water as soon as they are expelled, you might need to tilt your pan and scoop out some of the water as you warm the oysters to avoid wet omelette.
12. The egg and flour mixture now join in game and mix everything up together, adding a few dashes of fish sauce.
13. Taste and add more fish sauce if not salty enough. Add a sprinkle of white pepper powder.
14. Serve garnished with cilantro and spring onion.
---------------
Oyster omelette in Singapore's hawker center are oily, heart-clogging gems. Many cook it but only a few do it well. While I've had oyster omelette on many occasions, often, my mind wanders back to school time in Hwa Chong Junior College.
Some of my closest friends were in the school band and every school day and most weekends, we'll be playing or studying together in the "band corner", a few tables and benches just outside of the room where we store our musical instruments. Dinners and suppers were often part of it, and a very good friend, Xiao Hongquan, and I would sometimes share a plate of oyster omelette when we're at the hawker center. I can't remember for health or budget reason; I only knew that we both enjoyed that dish.
Fast forward to recent years, my younger sisters and Leon, deciding that this dish was bad for my health, put a stop to my eating it often, amongst other dishes (like kway chap - pig's intestines etc cooked in brooth and eaten with flat rice noodles; kway teow - wok fried flat and yellow noodles cooked with cockles and pork lard; and laksa - coconut curry noodles again with cockles, fish cakes and other good stuff).
Of course this dish isn't available in Midland. You can't find it in the Great Lakes Bay Region, and I'm sure not within a 2-hour drive time radius, which is as far as we would probably drive in a day to eat something.
I searched online for a good recipe and here's an amalgamated version I tried last night, and which turned out ok lah.
Ingredients
Fresh shucked oysters - either loose and sold by weight or sometimes in little tubs
3 eggs
A few dashes of Thai fish sauce
A dash of chinese cooking wine
White ground pepper - surprisingly hard to find around here as well
Some chopped fresh garlic - none of those minced-garlic-in-a-jar stuff; doesn't taste as good
Cilantro and thinly sliced spring onions
1 tablespoon rice flour
3 tablespoons tapioca starch
1/2 cup of warm water
1. Rinse oysters in water, set aside
2. Crack 3 eggs in a bowl, beat them, and set aside
3. Mix rice flour, tapioca
4. Heat up a large non-stick frying pan with some oil, maybe about 2 tablespoon or so - eyeball it.
5. Stir flour solution again (because the powder would have settled), and once pan is hot, pour it in.
6. Don't mess with it no matter how tempting. When the flour is transcluent (i.e. no longer pure white), pour beaten eggs over it. Add a dash of fish sauce.
7. Let eggs cook for a while on medium heat until a bit brown.
8. Make like a hawker and start going at the flour and egg mixture cutting them into smaller pieces with a lot noise. The eggs should be a bit brown and the flour mixture should be a bit crispy by now.
9. Push them to one side of the pan.
10. Add a bit of oil and add in garlic. Fry it a little and add a dash of chinese cooking wine.
11. Strain away the water from the oysters and add them in on top of the garlic. Lightly fry the oysters a little to warm them through. Those things expel water as you cook them so if your oysters are huge and the pan can't evaporate the water as soon as they are expelled, you might need to tilt your pan and scoop out some of the water as you warm the oysters to avoid wet omelette.
12. The egg and flour mixture now join in game and mix everything up together, adding a few dashes of fish sauce.
13. Taste and add more fish sauce if not salty enough. Add a sprinkle of white pepper powder.
14. Serve garnished with cilantro and spring onion.
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| We're going to plant some cilantro and spring onions. Too many times I want it and I don't have it!! (Photo updated Dec 2015) |
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