How to Make Oyster Sauce at Home

[muichoi]

Anyone have a recipe?I don't like the texture, colour or flavour of the commercial article.

[hzrt8w]

Do you mean a recipe on how to make oyster sauce, or how to make a dish with oyster sauce?

[Tepee]

How to make your own oyster sauce with some googling help.

[muichoi]

Thanks Tepee-I'm not entirely convinced that this has the ring of truth about it, though!

[muichoi]

Do you mean a recipe on how to make oyster sauce, or how to make a dish with oyster sauce?

←

How to make the stuff!

[muichoi]

True, but I'm sure the original is a thin greyish liquid, more akin to fish sauce than what we now buy.

[PassionateChefsDie]

All references I can find seem to imply that it's a fairly recent addition to cantonese cookery made with Oyster extract! As for how the extract is made, have you tried a straight puree of raw oysters this would certainly end up a greyish liquid! Yet with out the salt of soya sauce I wouldn't expect it to keep for more than a day if that!

Though as it seems a recently new addition I'd expect soya sauce in it. Why dont you play with straight pureed oysters until you find what you like, though from what you're saying it won't be oyster sauce but your own special!

May I ask why you think the original is a greyish liquid, have you seen this? The books I've got seem to imply its got soya and as soya sauce production has been going on for years your saying its older!

[muichoi]

I think I read this somewhere,but I don't remember the source. Anyone know the earliest reference?

[aprilmei]

True, but I'm sure the original is a thin greyish liquid, more akin to fish sauce than what we now buy.

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The real stuff IS a thin, greyish (actually, greyish-brown) liquid. I have a bottle of "real" oyster sauce that's made right by the pond where the oysters are harvested. Unfortunately, they only sell it where the oyster sauce is made - which means you have to take a long trip out there (it's in New Territories). There are no retail shops selling it.

[Laksa]

Thanks for digging that up hzrt, I found Eddie's post interesting.

First of all, Oyster Sauce IS made from Oysters. Basically fresh oysters are steamed open and their juice is collected. Most of the oysters are then smoked and sold as another product, while the juice is used as a base for Oyster Sauce. The juices are thickened with starch, colored with caramel, and flavored with salt and MSG. That's it.

Given that piece of information, I wonder about the feasibility of making oyster sauce at home.

I've never eaten steamed oysters, only raw ones, but I can't imagine that the liquid in steamed oysters would be all that strong in flavour. The juice would most likely need to be reduced.

How much liquid would be required to make a bottle of sauce, and how many oysters would you need to get that much juice? I can see how it can get expensive pretty quickly, especially so if you aim for high "oyster juice" content in your sauce.

And there's the problem with all the leftover oysters... What? Oyster omelette for dinner again? Oy veh!

Now if you're an oyster farmer with a surplus of oysters and no buyer...

Edited September 29, 2005 by Laksa (log)

[hzrt8w]

How much liquid would be required to make a bottle of sauce, and how many oysters would you need to get that much juice?  I can see how it can get expensive pretty quickly, especially so if you aim for high "oyster juice" content in your sauce.

And there's the problem with all the leftover oysters...  What?  Oyster omelette for dinner again?  Oy veh!

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I don't know much about the process of making oyster sauce. I suspect that you don't need that many oysters to make a bottle of oyster sauce. Remember they only said "oyster flavored sauce", which is what it really is. Not entirely "juice from oysters", just a flavoring. I think part of the flavor comes from the oyster shells. Tastes heavy in calcium. A big portion of oyster flavored sauce is the coloring, MSG, starch and such.

And, as Ed said, the leftover oysters are smoked and dried and sold as another product. I suspect that's "ho see" (dried oysters).

BTW: If you "blend" the fresh oysters to make oyster sauce, I think the result will be bad. A whole oyster contains its guts and everything. When you eat it, it's okay. When you blend the oyster, the dark green color "stuff" will come out and dominate the visuals and the taste.

Laksa: try some steamed whole oysters with shells (drip of cooked oil and soy sauce) in Cantonese seafood restaurants. They taste really good. Also, oysters with ginger and scallions, oysters with salt and pepper, and, of course, oyster omlettes.

[Laksa]

hzrt, my post was specifically about making oyster sauce at home, and what challenges one might face in an attempt to make a better product than what's available commercially. (Yeah, I know I wasn't very clear about that.)

I lack the know-how (or the necessary equipment) to smoke oysters so doing that is pretty much out of the question. Of course, a big corporation like Lee Kum Kee have the wherewithal to make the most of the raw oysters they buy, by turning out multiple products.

I enjoy toying with the idea though because I, unlike aprilmei, live very far from the New Territories and do wonder what the "real stuff" tastes like.

I will try steamed oysters next time I get a chance.

[Ben Hong]

I admire the curiosity and ambition of people who want to duplicate favourite things like commercial sauces and condiments. Yes I have, in my time, tried to do the same. However, all such attempts were were abandoned after a few tries because the results were less than spectacular. For the simple reason that one develops a preference and gets used to one brand or another, one style or another, one taste or another. If I had never tasted the Lee Kum Kee premium brand (girl poling a dinghy with a little boy) I may have developed a taste for other styles and brands. To me, the BEST homemade stuff or any other brand is NOT oyster sauce Same reasoning that HP Sauce and Lea & Perrins Worcestershire Sauce cannot or should not be duplicated. Why try to improve on perfection??

As a cooking tip, where oyster sauce is called for as an integral flavouring part of the dish, you might try using a combo of mam nuoc, a dash of sugar and one shake of msg as replacement. I find that it gives close to the same taste as oyster sauce, but with a lighter finish.

[hzrt8w]

Yeah, me too.

To me, I always like to find different ways to (or to improve on) use different sauces (just the means) to cook different dishes (that's the end results). I have not spent any energy to try to make the raw ingredients or sauces myself. As that would take too much effort (cooking dinner everyday is exhaustive enough as it is...).

Imagine that you would need to make your own:

soy sauce

tofu

soy milk

foo yu

rice wine

vinegar

bean sauce

(etc..)

Dry your own oysters, dry your own shrimps, scallops. Grow your own mushrooms? Make your own cheese? Brew your own wine? ...

[aprilmei]

Yeah, me too.

To me, I always like to find different ways to (or to improve on) use different sauces (just the means) to cook different dishes (that's the end results).  I have not spent any energy to try to make the raw ingredients or sauces myself.  As that would take too much effort (cooking dinner everyday is exhaustive enough as it is...).

Imagine that you would need to make your own:

soy sauce

tofu

soy milk

foo yu

rice wine

vinegar

bean sauce

(etc..)

Dry your own oysters, dry your own shrimps, scallops.  Grow your own mushrooms?  Make your own cheese?  Brew your own wine? ...

←

Come to Hong Kong and fill your luggage! (although you could probably only bring back bottled stuff). You can find a lot of this stuff here. In the States, it would be considered "artisinal" and it would cost much more. The stuff can be a little more expensive than what you get at supermarkets but it's not unreasonable and besides, I'd rather give the smaller producers my business. Lee Kum Kee does not need my money.

[anzu]

Imagine that you would need to make your own:

soy sauce

tofu

soy milk

foo yu

rice wine

vinegar

bean sauce

(etc..)

Dry your own oysters, dry your own shrimps, scallops.  Grow your own mushrooms?  Make your own cheese?  Brew your own wine? ...

←

I know you were talking rhetorically, but I was more-or-less in this situation for a while. It's interesting, but not necessarily much fun when you're doing it out of necessity.

I was living for several years in New Delhi, (several years back) and the only Chinese flavoring available was soy sauce. A fairly nasty type of vinegar was available too. Western ingredients mostly weren't available either.

Getting stuff from abroad wasn't possible - by mail it was too likely to 'disappear' before it got to you, and who had the money to get stuff from abroad when our very low income was in rupees?

I was getting pretty desperate for Chinese and Western ingredients and I did try making my own tofu, brewing wine, etc.

When you're already working a full-time day job (well, being a student in my case), and convenience products are almost non existent (and due to some complex health issues, not bought in our house anyway), and each grocery shopping trip means going to a different place for vegetables, a different place for fruit, for spices, for rice, etc., then making your own stuff is really, really exhausting...

[mthmchris]

First time posting on these forums, I dunno if something like this would be what y'all would be interested in. I usually post on Reddit over on /r/cooking, but sometimes these sort of hardcore 'food nerd' sort of recipes don't get a whole lot of traction. 

 

Oyster sauce is a classic ingredient in Chinese (and Asian in general) cooking, but there seems to be a lot of FUD out there concerning how its made. The English internet is almost barren of proper recipes for oyster sauce, so I thought it might be helpful to fill in the gap a bit.

 

Traditional oyster sauce is the by-product of making dried oysters. When making dried oysters, generally what you’ll do is blanch the oysters for 15-30 minutes first and then leave them out to sun-dry. The old oyster sauce origin story goes that a man in Macao named Lee Kum Sheung was making dried oysters, but forgot that he’d left the poaching liquid on the flame. He found it hours later reduced into a brown gloop… trying it, he found it was delicious, and so oyster sauce was born. And while these sort of stories are almost always apocryphal, that is the essence of oyster sauce.

 

Yet over the years, the popularity of oyster sauce skyrocketed while the usage of dried oysters flagged. This has led to a conundrum: oyster sauce could be sold cheap when it was the previously unused byproduct of dried oysters. But it makes no sense with the roles reversed – dried oysters as a by-product of oyster sauce? For those unfamiliar with Southern Chinese cuisine, dried seafood (while awesome) can get fucking expensive, and dried oysters are no exception.

 

So in modern times, producers tend to take one of two shortcuts. First, many don’t reduce the poaching liquid nearly as much, then add a mix of caramel (to color) and starch and celluse gum (to thicken). This is actually the method that produces good oyster sauce, and is what smaller manufacturers do here in Guangdong. The second shortcut? Simply using oyster extracts and combining it with a shit-ton of sugar and additives. This is what larger producers do, making for a product that barely has any oyster flavor.

 

What we’ll do today though is keep things old school, as the traditional method is easiest to recreate at home. But word of warning: the yield isn’t very large (~1/2 cup or less) so it makes very little sense to make oyster sauce at home unless you’re sun-drying oysters anyhow. So I’ll also let you know how to sun-dry the oysters, and because you might be unfamiliar with the ingredient (awesome ingredient btw), I’ll also list out a recipe for a classic homestyle Cantonese dish – oyster braised pork ribs – to give an idea on how to use up dried oysters.

 

I do have a video to go along with this, but let me know if linking YT vids is frowned upon here and I'd be happy to edit it out.

 

Ingredients, Sun-dried oysters and Oyster Sauce:

 

1. Shucked Pacific Oysters (生蚝), medium sized, 1.5-2kg. So we’re using oysters that we bought pre-shucked at our local market. If you’d like to wash and shuck enough oysters to get 1.5-2kg of them that’d obviously be best, but that feels (1) extraordinarily painful and (2) like it’d cost a fortune abroad.

2. Water, 4.5L. For blanching the oysters in.

3. Sugar, ½ tbsp. Added near the very end. AFAIK the super traditional version wouldn’t contain sugar, but modern recipes (ours included) are balanced around oyster sauce with some sweetness to it. Plus, it helps give a little thickness and color.

4. Light Soy Sauce (生抽), 1 tsp. Optional. Some producers add soy sauce in with the oyster sauce, some don’t. I like adding a little bit, helps with the color.

5. Bog-standard mass produced oyster sauce (蚝油), ½ tsp. Super optional. I like adding a touch in order to make use of their thickeners – it’s a lot easier to buy Lee Kum Kee oyster sauce at the supermarket than it is to buy cellulose gum. Helps everything come together a bit. This is really only my personal approach though, obviously.

 

Process, Sun-dried Oysters and Oyster Sauce:

 

1. If using pre-shucked oysters, give the oysters a quick rinse. Transfer the oysters in a ‘dangling’ motion over to a pot with a bit of tap water. Rinse the oysters for ~3 minutes. You don’t have to go too crazy here – we’ll be filtering the sauce later, and we do want that brininess. If you’re using clean fresh oysters, you can skip this step, simply toss the oysters together with their brine in a big bowl.

2. Get a pot of water to a light simmer. Transfer the oysters over in a dangling motion. The ‘dangling’ motion is to minimize dragging over any sediment from the oysters.

3. Poach the oysters for 30 minutes, stirring periodically. Make sure the water isn’t boiling. Rapidly boiling water has the potential to destroy the integrity of the oyster. Think something that’s roughly ‘poached egg’ heat.

4. Fish out the oysters and place in a strainer to drain. If you have one of those cool bamboo strainers, that’s awesome as you can both strain and sun-dry in the same thing (plus, you get super authentic bonus points). I like straining it over the pot that I’ll eventually be cooking the oyster sauce in, so as to not waste any of the liquid. If not using a bamboo strainer, transfer over to a baking sheet.

5. If it is sunny out: place the bamboo strainer in a location with lots of sunshine. Sun-dry for a day, flipping the oysters once around noontime. If you’re living in a city like us, it’s a good idea to hang the strainer in order to avoid bugs or cats getting to your oysters. Note that if it’s partly cloudy, the oysters might need two days to dry out completely – simply bring them inside and store in the fridge overnight.

6. If it’s not sunny out: place the oysters on a baking sheet and toss in an oven. Put the oven on its lowest possible temperature (100C for us) and crack the door. ‘Bake’ for six hours, turning the oysters once halfway through.Sun drying is preferable because (1) it produces a better dried oyster in the end and (2) doesn’t waste energy like the oven method. But hey… sometimes you were planning on sun-drying and the weather’s just not cooperating. Better to waste a little energy than a lot of seafood, yeah?

7. Lightly oil a stainless steel pot, and pass the leftover poaching liquid through a fine mesh strainer lined with a tofu or cheesecloth. So the vessel that we used here was a stainless steel wok (very convenient for this particular job), but anything stainless steel will work great. Why stainless steel? Not overly sure actually, my best hypothesis is that as it’s a stick surface some of the liquid will caramelize and brown as its reducing. Cast iron would also work. Just don’t use something like a non-stick or a claypot.

8. Lightly simmer the liquid for 3-4 hours to let it reduce, scraping the sides down with a rubber spatula every 5-10 minutes. This reduction is undeniably annoying, so the million dollar question: why not just toss the thing at a heavy bowl and let it reduce much quicker? The answer is that you’ll lose way too much oystery goodness to the sides of the pot and your final yield will be much, much less. The more paranoid you are during this stage, the more oyster sauce you’ll get. That said, if your primary goal is making sun-dried oysters, you might be cool with a yield of a couple tablespoons. In that case, no need to be so paranoid.

9. Once it’s bubbled down into a brown liquid with consistency that’s roughly akin to a very thin pan sauce, add in the sugar, the soy sauce (if using) and the oyster sauce (if using). Let it cook together for ~2 minutes. Once its come together, jar it up. You should be looking at roughly ~1/3 cup oyster sauce by the end. Store in the fridge.

 

Again, I understand that this is not a very large yield from 1.5-2kg of oysters. The rule of thumb for traditional oyster sauce is that it yields 1g of oysters sauce from every 100g of oysters, so I was already relatively happy with the yield this approach gave.

 

Your final product will be something with a very clear and obvious ocean-y taste. My recommended use for it – to get the most bang for your buck – is to use it in recipes in conjunction with the standard mass produced stuff. Adding a ½ tsp or a tsp per tablespoon to your store bought oysters sauce will give you the flavor of something that is roughly equivalent to a good quality Guangdong-locally-produced oyster sauce.

 

And now… how to use those dried oysters:

 

Ingredients, oyster braised pork ribs:

 

This is a relatively simple homecooked dish that is very similar to a Cantonese banquet dish, oyster braised pork knuckle. We went with this one because it’s the sort of thing that’s easy enough to whip up on a week night.

 

1. Pork ribs, cleaved across the bone into 1 inch pieces (排骨), 500g.

2. Marinade for the pork ribs: ½ tbsp salt, 1 tbsp sugar, 2 tsp cornstarch (生粉), 1 tbsp rice wine (米酒), ½ tbsp light soy sauce (生抽), 1 tbsp oyster sauce (蚝油). Mix the cornstarch together with the rice wine and add it in as a slurry – this will coat the ribs much more evenly. Note that this is basically a bog-standard marinade, with two exceptions: first, the cornstarch ratio is a touch less, as this will be braised in the end; second, we’re adding some oyster sauce in in order to repeat that ‘oyster’ flavor a couple times in the dish. We’re using rice wine in this dish as it’s really nice with pork ribs, but you could use also use Shaoxing wine or even sake.

3. Dried oysters (蚝豉), 50g reconstituted with one cup hot, boiled water. We’ll be reconstituting this with hot water – we did want this to be an easy-ish dish after all. You could alternatively use cool water and leave it to reconstitute for much longer (6+ hours in place of the 45 minutes we did here here).

4. Garlic cloves, 3. Lightly smashed.

5. Seasoning for the braise: 2 tsp light soy sauce (生抽), 1 tsp dark soy sauce (老抽), ½ tbsp sugar, 1 tbsp oyster sauce (蚝油). The mix of light and dark soy sauce is mostly for color.

6. Rice wine (米酒), 1 tbsp to use when stir-frying and 3 tbsp to top off the braise. Again, feel free to use liaojiu/Shaoxing wine or sake (which is a type of rice wine) instead.

 

Process, Oyster braised pork ribs:

 

1. Give the dried oysters a quick rinse, then add the one cup of hot, boiled water. Let it reconstitute for at least 45 minutes. Again, you could alternatively use cool water, adding it in the morning and coming back to it for dinnertime.

2. Rinse the pork ribs under running water for 10 minutes. Rinsing the pork ribs extracts the myoglobin, giving the pork a cleaner look and flavor. Feels like it makes it a touch more tender too, but I have nothing to back that claim up.

3. Add the marinade ingredients to the pork and mix well. Marinate for at least 30 minutes. Remember to make a slurry with the cornstarch so that things don’t clump.

4. Stir fry, then braise: As always, when stir-frying first longyau (huaguo in Mandarin): get your wok piping hot (around steak searing temperature), shut off the heat, add in your oil (here about 1 tbsp), then give it a swirl to get a nice non-stick surface. Heat on high now:

• Garlic cloves, in. Fry for ~15 seconds.

• Pork ribs, in. Fry for ~1 minute, stirring only periodically. We do want the pork to develop a bit of browning.

• ~1 tbsp of rice wine, in. Pour over your spatula and around the sides of the wok to let it sizzle and quickly reduce.

• Reconstituted oysters, in. Stir fry for ~15 seconds.

• Soaking liquid from the dried oysters, in. Pour in through a strainer so that it’s not grainy. Give everything a quick stir.

• Seasonings, in. Give it a quick stir.

• Heat off. Transfer over to a claypot or some other suitable braising vessel, making sure that you get all the liquid.

• Top off with the 3 tbsp of rice wine. Adjust the ribs to be relatively even. Some will be peaking out, that’s ok.

• Flame on low. Cover, cook for 20 minutes.

• Check on the pork ribs, making sure things aren’t bubbling too rapidly. Flip the ribs. Cook for 10 more minutes.

 

Enjoy some braised pork ribs. The dried oysters are my favorite part of this dish.

 

Note on economic considerations when making this outside of China:

 

I know oysters are expensive in the USA. One of my frustrations in the US is that food is generally (A) absurdly cheap processed shit or (B) absurdly expensive hyper-premium fare. Oysters are a perfect case – you either pay a pretty penny and get some (admittedly) really nice oysters, or turn to the can.

 

The way I would approach this is using frozen shucked oysters. I know those also aren’t cheap, from what I could find online they seem to run ~24 bucks per 16oz. That puts the cost of this recipe at ~72 dollars. Maybe I’m just poor, but that’s still… really expensive (by contrast, the cost of this recipe in China is CNY 135, or ~$20 US).

 

Still, the way to think of this isn’t $72 for a third of a cup of oyster sauce. The way to think of this is $72 to get a bunch of dried oysters, which are a great ingredient and pretty expensive if you bought them straight up. Then you get a bit of traditional oyster sauce on the side, which you can mix in with your standard bottled oyster sauce as I recommended above.

Edited October 31, 2018 by mthmchris (log)

[Spike L]

Hey Chris, welcome to eGullet! I don't think I'll be trying this recipe any time soon, but wanted to say that I absolutely love your channel. I haven't been on here in a while, but I think this is the PERFECT place for sharing this kind of stuff - if we can somehow dig some of the posters I remember from a few years back who really geek out on Chinese food (Dejah? hzrt8w? Prawncrackers?) I bet we'd get some really interesting discussions. 

 

In terms of food geekery, I will never forget when origamicrane made siu yuk with 8 different denaturing agents to find out what made the crispiest skin - so you should be right at home here!