Happy St Patrick’s day! In celebration this week, here’s a simple sweet corn snack that’d go well with a beer or two. A name for this Chinese snack means “a granary full of golden grains” (jin gu man cang), but it’s much more straightforward than it sounds: these are fried sweet corn kernels topped with salted egg yolks. There’s no need to add any other spices or flavours to it: the natural sweetness of the sweet corn balances perfectly with the salted eggs.

You can keep the egg whites to use in other recipes. For example, they can be mixed with minced pork.

This is very easy to make, and only takes around 10 minutes. The portions below serve two. If you are using frozen sweet corn, then please defrost it beforehand! Also, I’m using whole wheat flour in this version of the recipe, so the colour is a bit darker.

Ingredients
1.5-2 cups of sweet corn kernels
3-4 tbsps of plain flour
2 salted egg yolks

You’ll also need some water and plenty of oil for frying.

Step 1: lay the sweet corn kernels in a large plate, add 2 tbsps of water to the sweet corn and dust the flour over these. Coat the kernels evenly.

Step 2: boil/steam/cook the egg yolks. You can either cook the eggs whole and remove the yolk or remove the yolk from the raw egg (it will be solid while the white will be runny).

Step 3: check that the yolk has cooked, then mash this into a paste.

Step 4: heat a generous amount of oil in a frying pan. Once the oil is sizzling, add in the sweet corn and keep stirring. Cook until the coat of flour is golden (this should take around 3-4 minutes).

Step 5: sprinkle the egg yolk over the sweet corn. Stir for a further minute, then turn off the heat.

Step 6: ideally line a bowl with tempura oil absorbing paper, serve, dab off any excess oil and it’s ready to eat!

It’s a once-in-a-while treat, and the texture is (like tempura) crunchy outside but still a little soft inside. Did you enjoy it in the slightly chilly weather?

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