Last week, I was looking for a quick weeknight dinner/lunch to make out of the things I found in my fridge and stumbled upon this recipe for Cantonese slippery egg with tofu from SeriousEats, authored by J. Kenji Lopez-Alt.

I actually wanted to do the beef version but due to time constraints and not finding the cut I wanted, I switched over to tofu instead.

There is not too much to say about this recipe. It’s a straightforward recipe of stirfrying your aromatics, followed by the addition if some cooking wine and stock, then adding your tofu and peas along with some cornstarch before drizzling in the eggs. I was surprised by how much cornstarch was required. So much so that I actually ended up running low on cornstarch and had to substitute in tapioca starch to make the difference. The dish immediately thickened to a custard-like consistency upon adding it to the wok; I didn’t need to give it any time to simmer at all.

Things were going pretty swimmingly until the last step of drizzling the eggs in. So, I had a vague idea what this was supposed to be like. I’ve made egg drop soup; I knew that you were supposed to drip in a bit of egg at a time and make those nice looking ribbons.

Yeah, well, that didn’t happen. It happened much more quickly than I expected but as I held the bowl of whisked eggs, poised to drizzle in—not sure if it was because of the cornstarch present in the eggs—when I meant to drip a little in at a time, the entire mixture slipped in all at once.

My first immediate thought was, “uh shoot, that wasn’t supposed to happen.”

Suddenly, it looked like I was making scrambled eggs instead. Really liquid-y scrambled eggs. Mild panic set in for me when I realized that by the time I cook off the liquid from these eggs, there’s a good chance that the eggs would overcook and I wouldn’t have any runny eggs at all. In the usual spirit of me blowing things out of proportion, I made what was supposed to be a simple dish very stressful.

In a moment of hamfisted thinking, I decided to decant the excess liquid in the wok into the sink. However, this dish must really live up to its name for other reasons because y’all, the moment I tried to tilt the wok in the sink, a good portion of the egg tofu mixture slid out into the sink.

Oh, crap.

After cleaning out that mess in the sink, I resorted to an alternative solution—which was to cook it over low heat over constant stirring until more liquid boiled off and occasionally skimming the liquid off the top with a paper napkin.

The result was a dish that had more of a grainy/broken egg mixture than ribbons but taste-wise, it wasn’t too bad! This dish was a little bit on the blander side, which isn’t a bad thing! I think it could’ve benefitted if I even splashed in a bit of sesame oil and maybe some more white pepper. I ended up actually enjoying this quite a bit with some rice and chili garlic oil for dinner and lunch over the next few days. This dish could probably be paired with a more flavorful/umami dish to balance the meal out.

Overall, verdict is: not as bad as it could have been, more stressful than it needed to be, but that’s okay.