![]() Seafood Options- If you opt to add seafood on the already flavorful mix of your Chop Suey, the best options would be shrimps, prawns, scallops, squid, and mussels. The ones made here in the Philippines usually include pork or chicken liver, chicken heart, and gizzard. Pork, beef, and chicken being the most favored ones. Meat Options- there are also several meat options that you can choose from. On this recipe, I also used Pak Choi and Sugar snaps freshly picked from my backyard garden. Vegetable Options- You can use leftover vegetables on your fridge that needs to be cooked soon or harvest them fresh from your own veggie garden! The most common vegetables used for this dish are cabbage, carrots, onions, celery, bell pepper, cauliflower, broccoli, garlic, young corn, mushrooms, beans, bamboo shoots, and bean sprouts. It is mostly described as a "stir-fry of vegetables, meat, and seafood that comes with a thick sauce." This is the reason why Chop Suey has no exact formal definition. You can choose whatever you want or omit the ones you do not like. The good thing about cooking Chop Suey is that you can use as many varieties of vegetables, meat, seafood, and other additions as you like. The one I made, of course, is the Filipino way of making this mouth-watering dish that we eat with steamed with rice. But I have always known this dish to be paired with rice. Some historians claimed that this dish is originally noodle-based kind of like Chow Mein. This dish was somewhat made haphazardly by mixing whatever available ingredients or leftovers were at that time and tossing it into a thick sauce- then viola! - Chop suey was invented! Nevertheless, I saw a common trend in those stories. Foxy Tips for a Vibrant and Delicious Chop SueyĪs I was doing my research on this recipe, I was surprised to learn that the exact origin of this famous dish is still unknown! Yes, we know that it is an American-Chinese cuisine but there were so many accounts of how, when, and who started this dish that until now, are still left unproven.When prepared by cooks who understand the essence of stir-frying - high heat, short cooking time and just enough thick sticky brownish sauce to coat the ingredients - chop suey can be a truly delicious dish. ![]() Today, chop suey is cooked in pretty much the same way that most meat and vegetable stir fries are. It was so bad that the Chinese in America did not eat it.īut all that was long ago. American-style chop suey, in its earliest form, bore little resemblance to anything found in China. The immigrants who introduced the stir fry to America were not skilled cooks, and their attempt to replicate the dish from home was more Frankenstein-like than anything else. The difference between the source and the adaptation is in the cooking. While the term chop suey itself, spelled that way, may be an American thing, there are anthropological bases that the Chinese-American chop suey is most probably an adaption of the Chinese tsap seui (literally, “miscellaneous leftovers”), a dish found in Guandong where many of the early Chinese immigrants to the United States came from. Just think of fried rice and you get the idea. The story, in either version, sounds plausible enough especially when we consider how good the Chinese are at salvaging leftovers because being wasteful is frowned upon in Asia. ![]() American miners demanded food, the flustered Chinese cook didn’t have much to cook with so he got creative. He tossed them together, added sauce, and chop suey was born.Ī variation of the story pins the birth of chop suey during the Gold Rush. You might have read the story that, during the construction of the First Transcontinental Railroad when the Chinese flocked to the United States to seek work, American laborers wanted food but there was this Chinese cook had only bits and pieces of meat and vegetables. If that’s not confusing enough, I would learn much later that the American tale might be more myth than fact. Then I read that the dish was born in America. Along with sweet sour pork, I grew up thinking that chop suey was the quintessential Chinese food. ![]()
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