Hello everyone, today I am going to show you how to make homemade XO conpoy sauce.
I'd like to keep it in my fridge all the time. It's basic, versatile, and flavorful.
The main ingredient is conpoy, that is dried scallop. And we also need dried shrimp, and ham. You'd better use Jinhua ham here.
For a detailed recipe, please refer to the description down below, or go to my blog.
Start with adding a tbs. of cooking wine in dried scallop and dried shrimp. Cover with enough water to submerge the other ingredients.
Soak for at least 1 hour until both are tender and softened.
Now prepare the other ingredients. Dice onion.
If you use red onion here, it will add more flavors.
Dice garlic cloves.
Normally I'd like to use a garlic press to do the job. But here I suggest dice with a blade. Since we are going to deep fry the ingredients later, dicing the ingredients will keep them in roughly the same size, so that they won’t get burnt.
Now drain the softened ingredients. You can save the water as a broth for later.
Put dried scallop and Jinhua Ham in a steam pot. Steam over high heat for 15 minutes.
Chop up the softened shrimp.
Allow the steamed conpoy to cool down a bit. Wait until they are not too hot, tear them into thin strips.
Steaming process makes conpoy tender, so you can easily tear them apart. Make them into thin strips like this.
Don’t choose large dried scallops in a XO sauce, small ones are just fine.
Now do some prep with the ham. Trim off the fat part and skin.
You can save them in other dishes, because we only need the lean part for this sauce.
Cut the lean part into very thin slices, and then chop them up.
Keep them almost the same size as those chopped dried shrimp.
We are done preping. Let's turn on the burner.
In a frying pan, pour 500ml of vegetable oil. Heat the oil until it is half way to a boiling point, where you can see small bubbles rising around if you stick in a chopstick.
And then turn down the heat to medium, drop dried scallop strips to deep fry in the pan.
It takes about 5 minutes.
Wait until they become lightly golden, add chopped dried shrimps in.
Followed by chopped ham. Adding your ingredients in this order depends on the water content in each of them.
Fry for 3-5 more minutes until all the water in these three ingredients come out and they become golden with a little burnt.
If you are concerned about the temperature and time to cook these ingredients, you can fry them one by one separately.
In this way you will end up with ingredients that are evenly cooked.
Now in another pan, start working at the same time.
Get the three ingredients out of the pan when they are almost ready.
Right now we can see that there are a lot of white and thick foam, which means the water are all coming out of our ingredients.
Transfer them into another pan, and do not turn off the heat of this one, and keep the heat on low to medium.
Wait until it's warm enough, add in diced onion. Fry for 5 minutes until lightly golden.
As our onions is frying, let's take a look at this pot.
They are our cooked ingredients, conpoy, ham and dried shrimp.
Season them.
First, add in 4 tbs. Of cooking wine, 2 tbs. Of soy sauce.
Five tbs. of oyster sauce and a tbs. of sugar.
Pour the broth in it as well.
Slow cook them over low heat.
Let's get back to our onions.
Add the garlic in until onions are golden.
Again, if you are not sure about the temperature, you can fry them separately.
After garlic goes in, cook for 7-8 more minutes until they are both golden brown.
Garlic can easily get burned, so pay a close attention.
Now they are almost there, transfer the dried scallops, ham and dried shrimp back in the hot pan, and turn off the heat immediately.
Add in some chili flakes.
Adjust to your liking.
Add some black pepper, and mix them in when they are still warm. Now the XO sauce is done.
Allow it to cool down a little bit, and then transfer it in a jar.
I have cleaned this jar beforehand.
Slowly get the sauce in the jar, and left about 1 cm from the cap.
The amount of oil in my recipe can cover all the ingredients in this jar. If you are short of oil, you can heat up some and then pour them in the jar.
Make sure you seal all the ingredients under a layer of oil, so that you can keep the sauce for longer.
Wipe the jar, and then seal and store.
Don’t serve the sauce right away, leave it at room temperature for 3-5 days until all the flavors blend and incorporate with each other.
After a couple of days you will see that the sauce smells much better, and you can use it anyway you like.
XO sauce is very versatile. The simplest way to cook is to fry rice with a tbs. of the sauce, and it will light up the whole dish.
Anyway, you can serve it with all kinds of dishes. It's a very basic and useful sauce.
I truly suggest everybody give it a try. Hope you like it, and thanks for watching.