Tomato and egg stir fry

If you are familiar with Chinese cooking or have been to a Chinese family for dinner, most likely you will have heard of tomato and egg stir fry. This is a very common dish in most Chinese households because it’s so easy to make. In addition, tomato and eggs are readily available and doesn’t take long to cook. Thus, it’s a great way to get food onto the table quickly.

In Chinese home cooking we have multiple dishes at the dinner table and it’s usually eaten with steamed rice, buns or congee. Growing up, my mom would typically make 2-3 stir fry dishes, sometimes with soup along with rice or congee. When it’s busy, my mom would always make fast stir fry dishes; tomato and egg stir fry would usually be one of them.

Ingredients

The ingredients for tomato and egg stir fry are pretty self explanatory, it only has 2 ingredients, tomato and egg. Sometimes I like to add a bit of fresh chili peppers for some kick but the basic ingredient is just tomato, egg and a bit of salt.

I also add some scallions when I stir fry the tomato and egg to help elevate the flavour.

Here is one tip I can give you is to freeze your tomatoes. WHY?

Well freezing your tomatoes will cook faster and allow more juices to come out of the tomatoes. Additionally, it also helps to prevent your extra tomatoes from going bad too quickly if you can’t eat it fast enough.

You can also make noodle soups with the frozen tomatoes.

Also I like to do 1:1 ratio for tomatoes to egg, e.g. 3 tomatoes with 3 eggs (I’m using large eggs)

How to make it

Put the frozen tomatoes into a bowl and add hot water. Leave it for about 5 minutes

Crack 3 eggs and beat it. Take the tomatoes out of the hot water and peel off the skin. Cut the tomatoes into bite size pieces and set aside.

In a pan or wok, heat up some oil, add in scallions and the eggs. Once the egg is starts to solidfy, carefully break the egg apart.

Add the tomatoes. Season with salt. When the tomatoes start to release its juices, it’s done and you can serve with rice.

Pro-tip

• Freeze the tomatoes. Tomato flavour is more enhanced and also juices comes out of the tomatoes easily.
• Hot water on frozen tomatoes helps to take the peel off the tomatoes which sometimes gives it a more stringy texture in the stir fry.