Category: 64 Million Artists January Challenge

Think of a recipe or dish that is important to you and your family or culture. Share the recipe with somebody else, and ask them to share a recipe that is important to them.

Tea eggs are ubiquitous in Taiwan. If you go to 7-11 they will have vats of them, self-serve style, much like American 7-11s have hotdog cases. When I was little, we often had a big batch of tea eggs stewing on the stove.  If you look up tea egg recipes, they are often so neat and tidy, delicately made with orange peels, star anise, and bags of tea.  The tea eggs my mother made were messy and wild; she made them with loose tea, and as the eggs sat in soy sauce, the tight little dried tea leaves would unfurl, opening into an unkempt tangle that draped over the eggs like seaweed.  She also made sure to thoroughly crack the boiled eggs so that they would reveal beautifully marbled spiderweb patterns when unpeeled.  There was a kind of brazen imperfection in the pot of cracked eggs, as if they were daring you to judge them by their broke, flawed appearance, when in truths these cracks are what makes a tea egg – the cracks allows the flavor to seep into the egg whites and allow the soy sauce and tea to soak into the beautifully marbled patterns . Most recipes you find online call for letting the eggs sit for an hour or so, but that yields an egg that is beige or light tan. To get the deep brown colour of my childhood, the eggs need to sit… indefinitely. That is also part of the homey quality of tea eggs – they are a constant presence on the stove, always available for when one needs a quick savory protein snack, and filling the kitchen with the warm smell of tea and soy sauce.

When I make tea eggs, I sort of cheat. Primarily because I like my tea eggs slightly more soft boiled than typical. The tea eggs of my childhood always had that faint greenish ring around the yolk, which I always found unappealing. So for my method I make a batch of soft boiled eggs – these day in the instant pot – then I peel them and let them sit in the already cooked soy sauce and tea concoction. This way, it’s more of a marinating process then a stewing process and the eggs don’t continue to cook. You don’t get the beautiful marbled exterior, but it’s a trade off I’m willing to make to have the interior I like. I’ve never been one to value the aesthetics of food over the taste.

I don’t have a specific recipe: Soy sauce, tea, star anise, cinnamon stick if I have it. Toss, stir, steep, smell. It’s a very forgiving recipe. And if it doesn’t taste quite right, I’ve found that leaving the eggs in to steep even longer usually sets things right.