
When prepared by cooks who understand the essence of stir-frying - high heat, short cooking time and just enough thick sticky brownish sauce to coat the ingredients - chop suey can be a truly delicious dish. Today, chop suey is cooked in pretty much the same way that most meat and vegetable stir fries are. Chow mein is one of the signature dishes of Chinese cuisine while chop suey is an American creation using Chinese cooking techniques. The two may seem similar, but their ingredients, preparation, and origins are different. It was so bad that the Chinese in America did not eat it.īut all that was long ago. Ingredients 3 tablespoons oil 1 1/2 pound pork or chop suey meat 1/2 pound fresh mushrooms 1 cup sweet onion 2 cups celery 1 teaspoon salt 1/8 teaspoon. We named this recipe after a popular Chinese take-out dish that has a little bit of everything thrown in together. Chow mein and chop suey are both Chinese stir-fry dishes often found on restaurant and take-out menus. American-style chop suey, in its earliest form, bore little resemblance to anything found in China. The immigrants who introduced the stir fry to America were not skilled cooks, and their attempt to replicate the dish from home was more Frankenstein-like than anything else. The difference between the source and the adaptation is in the cooking. While the term chop suey itself, spelled that way, may be an American thing, there are anthropological bases that the Chinese-American chop suey is most probably an adaption of the Chinese tsap seui (literally, “miscellaneous leftovers”), a dish found in Guandong where many of the early Chinese immigrants to the United States came from. Just think of fried rice and you get the idea. The story, in either version, sounds plausible enough especially when we consider how good the Chinese are at salvaging leftovers because being wasteful is frowned upon in Asia. See ingredients, nutrition, and other product information here.


This mixture of Asian-style vegetables includes bean sprouts, onions, and carrots. It can also be served on a bed of fried rice or crispy fried. La Choy Chop Suey Vegetables add a new twist to your everyday meals. American miners demanded food, the flustered Chinese cook didn’t have much to cook with so he got creative. Because this dish has a thick, flavorful gravy, its best served over plain rice or noodles. He tossed them together, added sauce, and chop suey was born.Ī variation of the story pins the birth of chop suey during the Gold Rush. You might have read the story that, during the construction of the First Transcontinental Railroad when the Chinese flocked to the United States to seek work, American laborers wanted food but there was this Chinese cook had only bits and pieces of meat and vegetables. If that’s not confusing enough, I would learn much later that the American tale might be more myth than fact. Then I read that the dish was born in America. Along with sweet sour pork, I grew up thinking that chop suey was the quintessential Chinese food.
