Homemade Egg Drop Soup for a Cold, Snowy Week

I decided to make egg drop soup this week because we had another hit of winter, and I was feeling like being warm and cozy, so soup just fit my mood. For this week I began with quite a bit of research.

Recipe Blogs

I started with a travel/recipe blog called The Woks of Life. The author explains that their family owns a Chinese restaurant, and at this restaurant they made 3 soup types daily. Egg drop soup was one of them. I enjoyed the preamble to the recipe, because it made me excited to try and make it myself, and the personal background felt wholesome. He also included some great tips, such as an explanation of how stirring speed would impact the texture of the eggs. At the bottom of the blog portion you can find the condensed version of the recipe. I also appreciated that there was a large number of comments on the post. I find personal experiences are fun to read, and can be helpful in avoiding pitfalls. One comment mentioned that they were adding chicken and vegetables to the soup, and I thought that would be a great way to make the soup more hearty. I realized partway through my research that egg drop soup is more of a Chinese dish than Japanese, but I decided to make it anyway.

Youtube

I decided to give myself a little extra background by going to YouTube. The video above is one of the multiple videos that I checked out. The videos included a bit of extra technique, and I appreciated the extra tips, but I will admit I kind of preferred the more relaxed technique and approachability of the blog approach. For example, the blog above said I could change the texture of the egg by changing how fast I stirred as the eggs were slowly poured in, but the videos were looking for a very specific texture of egg, so the instructions are much more specific.

Time to Get Cooking!

I decided to buy chicken broth instead of making it this time, because I found myself at a wonderful farmers market this weekend, and the broth looked excellent, so I decided to give it a try for my egg drop soup.

I skipped a few seasoning items because there was already some seasoning in my broth. For example, both the blog and the YouTube videos recommended using tumeric to give the soup a nice yellow colour. The broth I had bought already had tumeric though, so I skipped this step. I did add sesame oil, salt, sugar and the pepper that my recipe called for. I adjusted the amounts by tasting the broth as i went.

After letting the soup simmer for a while to get the correct temperature I mixed up my eggs, and prepared a cornstarch slurry for thickening. I found a keto version of this soup that recommended a thinner texture and either no cornstarch or minimizing the amount, so I decided to try a smaller amount of slurry. I prefer the thinner texture, so I don’t feel like I am eating a gravy. I mostly followed the other recipe, but i felt more confident doing some experimentation after reading the extra blog. I decided I wanted tiny egg “flowers” as the first blog called them, so I ended up stirring fairly quickly when I first added the eggs to my simmering soup. This ended up giving me soup that was cloudy at first and I was quite concerned that I had made a big mistake. I slowed down as I continued to add eggs though, and I was quite happy with both the texture and flavour of this soup in the end. I served it with grilled cheese sandwiches, because my kids can only take so much adventurous eating. Overall I though the blog was more forgiving and easy to follow. I appreciate a recipe that gives me a bit of freedom to play around and adjust things to my taste.

I think next time I would like to try stirring more slowly to get more of the stringy texture that egg drop soup is known for. It was a perfect soup for this cold snowy week, and hopefully before too long we can get back to spring temperatures, and more Asian food adventures!