Recipe Day: Improved Egg Drop Soup

I originally posted this recipe for Egg Drop Soup back in 2006. Because recipe improvement is easier than self-improvement, here is an updated version that gets closer to my goal of delivery-restaurant-quality soup.

• 4 cups chicken broth, made from Bouillon cubes
• 1/8 teaspoon ground ginger
• 2 tablespoons chopped chives
• dash of white pepper
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 1 1/2 tablespoons cornstarch
• 2 whole eggs and 1 egg yolk

Directions

• Make chicken broth in a pot, then cool 1 cup of the broth in the fridge until it is no longer warm. Stir in cornstarch (into the cool broth) until it is clump-free.
• In a small bowl, whisk the eggs and yolk together with a fork.
• Pour the remaining 3 cups of broth into the widest saucepan you have. Stir in ginger, chives, pepper, and salt. Bring to a rolling boil and then lower heat to simmer.
• Stir in the cold cornstarch broth to thicken.
• Apply academic knowledge of angular momentum to set up circular waves in the saucepan. Keep slow but steady waves circling the saucepan throughout the next step. This is critical to obtaining egg strings instead of egg clumps, and it's very helpful to have someone else stirring constantly!
• Drizzle egg a little at a time from the fork into the broth. It will cook immediately, and the broth in motion will cook it in strings rather than clumps.
• Once all of the egg has been added, remove from heat and serve. Makes 2-3 bowls.
• Garnish with chopped green onions if you have any left in your fridge, since every recipe calls for one stalk's worth and they're sold by the bushel.

CMMI Lessons Learned

• Using part of the broth to make Rob Kelley's slurry instead of cold water minimizes any thinning of the taste. Previously, I had to resalt the broth to make up for the cold water and often ended up making it taste like the ocean.
• Using a wide radius saucepan instead of a pot makes it much easier to drizzle the egg in strands rather than clumps.
• Adding the slurry before the egg improves the suspension of the egg in the broth.

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