12.070
16 (Tue) March 2021
Scallion Egg Wraps
3.5
by me
at home
-Changgok, Sujeong, Seongnam, Gyeonggi, Republic of Korea-
with the Family
Jianbing is a Chinese dish. It’s a thin flour pancake, coupled with scrambled egg, topped with various ingredients (e.g. pickles, scallions, meats) and slathered in sauces (e.g., chili sauce, hoisin sauce, ketchup), typically folded for portability, often eaten by hand. A classic street food, often for breakfast.
The Korean dish jeonbyeong, which derives from the same Chinese characters (煎餅), comprises a rolled buckwheat pancake, filled with mandu-like ingredients (e.g., pork, kimchi, tofu), lightly pan-fried (see 7.130 Makguksu).
Every Monday, The New York Times offers a full-page spread featuring “Five Dishes to Cook This Week.” I have piles of them – now that I am back in Korea, I have rediscovered the joy of receiving a daily newspaper made of paper, which allows me to tear out pages that I wish to keep – but I hadn’t gotten around to making any of the recipes.
Until I saw the recipe for Genevieve Ko’s modified jianbing (see NYT scallion egg wrap).
The recipe calls for 2 large eggs per tortilla, but my initial batch of 2 medium eggs suggested that was way too much egg, at least for the smaller fajita-sized tortillas that I had.
I made a second batch with 3 medium eggs for 2 tortillas, which still seemed a bit too much.
Next time, maybe just 1 medium egg each.
The wraps were awesome. Perfectly soft and chewy tortillas, as if they’d been engineered only for this specific application. The eggs were crispy on the edges, tender in the middle, laced with scallions and pops of zhacai. The hoisin brought it together, making the wrap taste like Breakfast Peking Duck, maybe even better without any duck. What a breakthrough.
I’m already envisioning adaptions, like an American version with cheese + ketchup (+ maybe bacon), a Korean version with kimchi + gochujang (+ maybe squid, or pork belly), an Italian version with olives + sun-dried tomato paste (+ maybe anchovies), a French version with mushrooms + truffles (+ maybe lobster), and so forth.
(See also FOODS.)
(See also PLACES.)
Interesting! Nice attempt at jianbing. Personally I think the tortilla is way too thick for this purpose. The actual version is much more like a thin paper like crepe (kind of like dosa).
In China we usually fill it with romaine lettuce (raw), sometimes a meat (a split hotdog or ham is pretty common) and importantly, a crispy fried cracker. The sauce is sweet bean sauce and sometimes chili sauce, with sesame seeds. The contrasting textures in this is so good.
Kudos to you for always being adventurous.
i also thought that the tortilla would be too thick, but the moist heat of the egg made the tortilla so soft and supple that it didn’t feel thick at all.
everything in the wrap this time was soft, but next time I’ll try some contrasting textures.