Stir-Fried Sunflower Shoots with Egg
The other way to stir-fry sunflower shoots: scramble the egg first, greens in last, off the heat in forty seconds. One pan, under ten minutes, and a meal rather than a side dish.
Recipe
- Prep
- 5 min
- Cook
- 3 min
- Total
- 8 min
- Makes
- 2 servings with rice
Main course · Thai
Ingredients
- 150g sunflower microgreens
- 3 eggs
- 3 cloves garlic, chopped
- 1 tbsp light soy sauce
- 1 tsp fish sauce
- 1/4 tsp white pepper
- 2 tbsp neutral oil
- Steamed rice, to serve
Method
- 1
Beat the eggs loosely
Beat the eggs with the fish sauce and white pepper, but only just — streaks of white left in the bowl give you the soft folds that hold the greens. Have everything else within reach before the pan goes on.
- 2
Scramble and remove
Heat 1 tbsp oil over high heat, pour in the egg, and push it around for about 30 seconds until it is set in large soft curds but still glossy. Tip it back into the bowl. It will finish cooking on its own residual heat, and again when it returns to the pan.
- 3
Garlic in the same pan
Add the remaining oil and the garlic to the hot pan and stir for ten seconds, until fragrant and still pale.
- 4
Greens in, egg back, out
Add the sunflower shoots and the soy sauce and toss hard for 30 to 40 seconds, until the leaves collapse and the stems are still firm. Return the egg, fold it through twice — no more, or it breaks up — and serve over rice immediately.
Our garlic stir-fry treats sunflower shoots like pak bung: a side dish, sauce-forward, out of the wok in under a minute. This is the other version — the one that turns the same punnet into dinner. The egg does two useful things: it carries the seasoning, and it gives the shoots something soft to sit against, so the crisp stems have something to be crisp compared to.
Why the egg comes out and goes back in
It is tempting to scramble the egg and throw the greens straight in on top. Do not. Egg left in the pan while the greens cook goes rubbery and brown at the edges, and the greens need the pan at full heat with nothing in it damping the temperature. Thirty seconds in a bowl costs nothing and is the difference between soft folds and dry crumbs.
Forty seconds, and it is not an estimate
Sunflower shoots are water held in a thick stem. Over heat, the water leaves and the stem goes flat — and unlike a tougher green, there is no slow-cooked stage that brings it back. Forty seconds is the ceiling. If you are cooking for four, do two batches rather than loading the pan, which drops the temperature and steams the lot.
Dry greens, hot pan
If you washed the shoots, dry them completely. Wet greens spit in hot oil and, worse, cool the pan at precisely the moment it needs to be hottest.
Variations
- Add 100g minced pork with the garlic, cooked through before the greens go in, for the standard Thai rice-plate version.
- Swap half the sunflower for water spinach shoots — a slightly firmer stem and a cleaner flavour against the egg.
- Finish with fried shallots rather than white pepper if you want crunch that survives sitting on the table.
Like every sunflower shoot dish, it does not keep. The texture is the point, and the texture is gone within ten minutes of leaving the pan — so cook it when people are already sitting down.
Featured in this article
Try these microgreens
Nutty, crunchy, slightly sweet — a salad favourite.
Mild and green with hollow, juicy stems — the tender half of pad pak bung.