Yong Tau Foo — My Father’s Recipe

We ate at a round table. It was the only piece of furniture my father, Sui Hing, was ever really proud of. He bought it with care, used it for the rest of his life, and it still sits in my brother’s house today.

That table is where I tasted his Yong Tau Foo, week after week, year after year. He never wrote the recipe down. He never had to. He cooked it the way a person who has cooked something a thousand times cooks it — by feel, by ratio, by the colour the garlic turned in the pan. When he passed, the dish went with him. Except, it turned out, it didn’t quite. He had cooked it in front of me enough times that I knew it from the inside. I make it now. I make it for my own family. I am, as far as I can tell, the only person who still does.

I’m not sure what dialect Yong Tau Foo properly belongs to. The stuffing — pork and fish paste, packed into vegetables — points to Hakka. But my father never used 大地魚, sole fish powder, which is the soul of a proper Hakka Yong Tau Foo. He didn’t have a hawker’s adherence to a tradition. He had his version. He’d taught himself.

He had a stall for a short while — 盛兴, Seng Heng, “prosperity and flourishing.” The queue was long enough that he needed help, and he couldn’t find any. We — my siblings and I — were all studying, doing what we were meant to do. The stall closed. The recipe came home with him, and it stayed in the family.

What I changed

Two things make my version different from his, and from most other versions you’ll find.

A French technique inside a Chinese dish. When you make a classical French mousseline — the very fine fish or chicken forcemeat used for quenelles and stuffed poultry — you beat cold cream into the puréed meat, gradually, over ice. The cream lightens the paste, emulsifies it, and gives the cooked stuffing a silken texture. I started adding a small amount of cream to my father’s pork-and-fish paste years ago, and the difference is the kind of thing that only matters if you care. The stuffing is finer. It holds together more reliably when fried. It’s slightly more buoyant in the mouth.

A clearer stock, less soup. My father made a whole pot. He’d fry the stuffed pieces, build a stock from scratch, and the dish lived in liquid — half braise, half soup. Mine sits closer to a French sauce: just enough liquid to coat and finish the vegetables, not enough to drink with a spoon. Neither of us has ever used the yellow soy-bean broth that hawker stalls in Singapore tend to default to. That was his choice. It became mine.

On the technique that matters most

The stuffing has to be stirred until it gets sticky and springy — the Chinese cooks I grew up around called this 起腼 (qǐ jiāo), meaning “rising glue.” In food science terms it’s myosin extraction: salt and stirring in a single direction develop the meat proteins until they bind and the paste turns elastic. The texture you want is what gives fish balls and meatballs their characteristic “QQ” bite. You will feel the moment the paste changes — it will pull cleanly away from the sides of the bowl and form ridges that hold their shape. Until that happens, keep stirring.

The cream then goes in slowly, in two or three additions, beaten through after each. The paste should stay smooth and pale, not split. If it starts to look broken, you’ve added too much too fast.

Notes on the vegetables

Use what you can find, but four of them are non-negotiable in this house: chillies, tofu, mushroom, bitter gourd. The chilli for heat and a contrasting bite of vegetable. The tofu because Yong Tau Foo without tofu isn’t really Yong Tau Foo. The mushroom because the umami it picks up from the stuffing is the best part of the dish. The bitter gourd because every version of this in our family had one, and the contrast between the bitterness and the rich stuffing is what makes the whole plate work.

Tomato, brinjal (eggplant), lady’s fingers (okra), and hard-boiled eggs are also welcome. Tomatoes are particularly good — halved across the equator, hollowed slightly, stuffed across the cut face. They collapse a little as they cook and pick up the stock beautifully.

A word on the stock

Don’t skip the Shaoxing wine (花雕酒, hua diao jiu). Drizzled onto hot oil and garlic just before you add the stock, it gives the dish a depth that nothing else does. If you don’t have it, a dry sherry works. The dark soy is for colour as much as flavour — go light or you’ll lose the look of the stuffing.

After dinner

I make this dish more often than is reasonable. It feeds six comfortably. It freezes well — the stuffed pieces can be pan-fried, cooled, and frozen flat, then dropped into hot stock from frozen. It is one of the most forgiving dishes I know, and one of the most personal.

If my father had written down the recipe, this would be that note. He didn’t, so this is mine, in his memory.