Monday I made J. Kenji Lopez-Alt’s Egg Drop Soup recipe from The Wok.

The soup is surprisingly easy. Everyday Chicken and Ginger Stock is brought to a bare simmer and then a cornstarch slurry is added to slightly thicken the broth.

With the wok on low, eggs whisked with salt and cornstarch are drizzled in. Kenji says the cornstarch “impedes protein connections, preventing the eggs from getting rubbery.” He describes a technique for the drizzle. After getting the broth going in a swirl and “holding a pair of chopsticks or the tines of a fork on the edge of the bowl, slowly drizzle the egg mixture into the soup, shaking the fork or chopsticks back and forth rapidly to flick the egg mixture as it drizzles.” I drizzled too quickly at first, but had a fine flicking drizzle going by the end. The broth stopped swirling by the end, too. I moved my drizzling in a circle to compensate.

The soup sits for a few seconds to set the eggs a bit, and the it’s stirred gently to break the egg into the “desired size.”

Scallions get sprinkled on top, and that’s it!

The soup came out exactly right. I’d say it was restaurant quality, but I think that’s a low bar. Kenji even disparages egg drop soup in the introduction to the recipe

For the longest time I really disliked egg drop soup, and it’s because I’d only ever had it from the Chinese buffets where it’d been sitting out all day on a steam table, slowly reducing into a viscous, mucus-like neon-yellow glop with rubbery bits of overcooked egg floating in it, along with the occasional odd sliced button mushroom

before describing what he considers the “best” egg drop soup. And then in the introduction for the next recipe, Hot and Sour Soup, he recounts his fear of trying hot and sour soup and being “stuck like a sucker sipping on egg drop forever.”

All that to say that not much is expected of egg drop soup. This recipe was a perfectly good version of it, but it’s not a soup we get excited about it. In fact, Megan has never had it before.

Everyone but my daughter (vegetarian) ate it. I served it with pan cooked chicken breast (saved from the chicken used to make the stock), rice, and salad, and both Megan and my son put pieces of their chicken in their soup and preferred it that way.

I am cooking my way through J. Kenji Lopez-Alt’s The Wok cookbook. Read more about it.