Curry Green Beans in Salted Egg Yolk Sauce
In my several attempts at sticking to various types of diets over the years, the one constant for keeping at it for a long time is having easily accessible food nearby. We’re trying to eat healthier overall, or at least include our homemade sources of fiber even if we do get takeout from the food trucks or get Popeyes on Doordash or whatever.
The prep I’m doing for this fibermaxxing era is pretty simple. Mostly just washing and cutting. Wash all the fruits. Clean, cut, and portion all the raw vegetables for munching. It’s also easy enough to just add half an avocado and eat it for the nutrition instead of for taste or how it goes in the meal, but having ways to integrate it into the meal is better for my sanity and long term ability to stick to this “diet.”
We also replaced our white rice with a 2/3 haiga (semi-brown) rice + 1/3 quinoa mix. In general, we should be eating more whole grains… but they taste like dirt! This mix is a decent compromise. It has 10% of my daily fiber goal per bowl, and still tastes soft and nutty, more like white rice than brown rice or gritty lentils.
I like to live to eat, I am eating to live a little bit here, but it’s better mentally if it’s enjoyable and not just a checkmark to hit my fiber goal. But for me to actually eat it during the weekday, it has to be readily available. So on the weekends, I’m also cooking some simple vegetable dishes to switch it up when I can.
This week I impulse purchased salted duck eggs from Costco. Yes, they are available in every single Asian store for cheaper. The packaging was pretty, okay!?!?! This is one of the ways I used this pack. The other was fried rice with aforementioned mix.
Green Beans in Curried Salted Egg Yolk Sauce
Prep
Like all stir fries, the cooking goes pretty fast once everything is prepped, so finish all the prep before starting the cooking steps. You can even pre-mix the seasonings in a bowl.
Wash, trim and cut the green beans into 2” pieces:
1.5 lb green beans
Cut the salted egg in half, through the shell (the skin is too brittle to peel), and separate the yolk and whites:
3 cooked salted duck eggs
With the back of a spoon, push the yolks through a sieve to break it into a fine powder consistency.
Dice the whites into small cubes.
Mince 6 cloves of garlic.
Bring a pot of lightly salted water to a boil for blanching the green beans.
Cooking
When the water is almost boiling, start your sauce in a saute pan on medium heat:
2 Tbsp oil
garlic
salted duck egg yolks
Stir to separate the yolks and melt them into the oil.
Once the yolks are incorporated, add 2 tsp S&B curry powder.
Around this time, the blanching water should be ready. Drop the green beans into the blanching water.
if the water needs more time, simply turn off the heat on the sauce until the water is boiling, and reheat it once the beans are in the water.
Blanch beans for ~1 minute, and transfer with a slotted spoon or strainer directly into the saute pan.
Add the reserved diced salted egg whites.
Season:
1 tsp oyster sauce
1/2 tsp sugar
1 tsp soy sauce
On medium-high heat, stir to coat the green beans with the sauce.
Serve!
Notes
You can of course just saute the green beans with the garlic, then add the yolks + curry powder after, and finish with seasoning. I wanted to have easier control over the doneness of the green beans since I’m using it for meal prep.
The S&B curry powder is a Japanese curry powder, so it doesn’t have all the spices or taste like Indian curry. It tastes like the curry block Japanese curry flavor, but is not the forefront flavor here.
The yolks and whites are pretty salty, so do not over-season the blanching water. Likewise, adjust the additional seasoning to taste. A bit of sugar will help balance the salt though.