Stewed Egg Salad (Lu Dan)

Stewed Egg Salad (Lu Dan)

Stewed Egg Lu Dan Salad

Stewed Egg is a very common dish in Taiwan and we call it “Lu Dan”. I loved to order a stewed egg with my lunchbox when I live in Taiwan or I will order stewed egg with my mince rice or mince noodle. Stewed egg is just simply the best friend with a lunchbox.

I always remember the first time my husband tried this stewed egg at home his face looked like he had been struck by lightning. After the first time he tried this stewed egg he fell in love with it. He always asks me to cook this stewed egg if he knows I’m going to cook stewed pork or chicken.

This stewed egg needs to cook in soy sauce and spices for a while and soak in the sauce for few hours to make sure eggs has all the fragrances from the sauce. So, you can imagine this egg has a lot of flavour in it.

 

Stewed Egg Salad (Lu Dan)

Course Main Dish
Prep Time 4 hours
Total Time 4 hours
Servings 2 people

Ingredients

Ingredients

  • 6 eggs
  • 1 thin slice ginger
  • 1 spring onion
  • 2 cloves garlic
  • 1/2 chili

Seasonings

  • 1.5 tbsp sugar
  • 1 cup soy sauce
  • 1 tbsp rice wine
  • 1/4 tsp salt
  • 2 cups water
  • 1 star anise
  • 3 cm cinnamon stick
  • 1/2 tsp cumin
  • 1/4 tsp Sichuan pepper use a Chinese spice bag if you have one

Instructions

  1. Use a little bit of oil to sauté ginger, spring onion, garlic and chilli.
  2. Place all the seasonings into a sauce pan and boil it by full strength gas power.
  3. After sauce boiling we turn the gas power to the lowest and simmer for 2 hours.
  4. Take out the eggs from fridge and leave it aside for while to make sure it’s reach room temperature.
  5. Cook the eggs from cold water and keep moving them when you cooking. (This way can make sure the egg yolk will stay in the middle.)
  6. After the water is boiling we turn the gas power to medium and cook for another 5 minutes.
  7. After 5 minutes we take the eggs out of the hot water and soak it in cold water. Peel the eggs when they have cooled down.
  8. Place the eggs into the sauce we made and cook them for 40 minutes.
  9. After 40 minutes just soak them in the sauce for a couple hours. You will see the eggs turning a light brown colour and it’s ready to eat. My grandma always cook the egg a day before and soak them over night.

 

Tiger Bite Pig Recipe

Tiger Bite Pig Recipe

tiger bite pig

For some reason, Taiwanese people really like name their food in a different and funky way.  For example, “Coffin Bread” and also  “Tiger bite Pig”, which is also known as “Koah-pau” in Taiwanese.

Why is it called tiger bite pig? Because the bread looks like a tiger chewing a piece of big and juicy pork in it’s mouth, that’s why we call it Tiger bite Pig. Another dish named after the look.

Nowadays, Taiwanese business man created different filling and flavour for this dish. For example, they use deep fried chicken fillet, cod fish fillet or beef to replace the stewed pork belly. So, this dish is just like a “Taiwanese version of hamburger”.

This dish has another lucky meaning of it. Because the shape looks like a “wallet” so it’s also mean “rich” or “a lot of money” in Taiwan. So, let’s make it at home and eat a lot of tiger bite pig for praying for a lucky financial year! (I need eat a lot of tiger bite pig this year and need probably three times a day, lol).

 

Tiger Bite Pig

Course Main Dish
Prep Time 1 hour
Total Time 1 hour
Servings 6 buns

Ingredients

Ingredients for Stewed Pork

  • 450 g pork belly with skin
  • 2 spring onions
  • 2 thin slices ginger

Seasonings for Stewed Pork

  • 1 tbsp maltose
  • 1 tbsp brown sugar you can also use 80g crystal sugar, I just use the ingredients I got at home and I think crystal sugar is available in most of Chinese supermarket
  • 400 g soy sauce
  • 100 g rice wine
  • 1 star anise
  • 2 slices liqourice optional
  • 5 cm cinnamon stick you can use a Chinese spice bag to replace all the spice in this dish if you can find it in Chinese supermarket
  • Stock for covering the pork

Ingredients for Steamed Bread

  • 200 g plain flour
  • 250 g bread flour
  • 1 cup water
  • 7 g dried yeast

Instructions

Procedures for Stewed Pork

  1. Use a frying pan to heat up 1 tablespoon oil and turn the gas power to lowest and fry the pork belly. Don’t use too much oil or too high heat because I don’t want you to burn yourself.
  2. Fry the pork until it’s turn slightly golden colour and place it on a plate then brush a little bit of soy sauce on every side of it to colour it with soy sauce. Leave it until it’s cool down and we cut it into 1.5 cm thick and 5 cm wide slice.
    tiger bite pig pork belly
  3. Place every thing into a small stock pot and use full gas power to boil it first, then turn the gas power to the lowest to simmer it until the pork is nice and soft.

Procedures for Steamed Bread

  1. Mix yeast with the water and melt the yeast.
  2. Mix step 1 with flour and knead it until it’s turn to a smooth dough.
    how to make tiger bite pig
  3. Find a warm spot for the dough and cover it by a cling film or clean and wet tea towel then leave it for 30~40 minutes. I live in Edinburgh and the weather here is really cold so I leave it for 30~40 minutes.
  4. After the dough arise. We separate it into 70g each and knead it into round shape then we use a rolling pin to flatten it into a long oval-shaped.  After we brush oil on the flatten dough and fold it to half and use rolling pin gently press down the central to make the shape settle.
    tiger bite pig procedure
  5. Steam it in a steamer with medium to full gas power for 8~10 minutes until you touch the bread and it’s has resilience, not too soft like the dough before. Then it’s done!

Recipe Notes

* After you’re done steaming the bread and stewing the pork you can start to make your tiger bite pig. Traditionally, we put peanut powder and coriander with stewed pork. But you also can put anything you like it.