Eat All The Things: Inaugural Recipe and the Smells of Home: Chinese Tea Eggs

Good morning! I'm excited to share the very first E.A.T.T. recipe with you all. It predictably breaks some of the rules I put forth in my introductory post about what this blog will entail. It doesn't employ your pantry staples unfortunately, but I'm confident you can find an Asian grocer a short drive away and get these delicious and nutritious snacks going before lunchtime!

It also requires precision. You don't want to under-boil these eggs and get a scalding surprise when you try to crack them for the pretty patterns.

Without further ado...

Chinese Tea Eggs - Cathy Makes Food That Her Mom Makes

I'm headlining this recipe for three main reasons:

1) Apparently in Taiwan, where 7-Elevens abound and feed many a snack-happy pedestrian, tea egg sales top 40 million per year [1]. That's INSANE. Did you know there were even that many eggs in the world? I didn't, but it's good news. It means I can hoard eggs and not feel too bad about it. (Side note that should probably make it to the "Me! Me! Me!" page: I LOVE eggs. I eat 5-6 a day. 2 at breakfast and 3 more poached, fried, or hardboiled and added to entrees...I was recently affirmed in my habits and can assure you that it's OK to eat this many eggs a day.) Anyway, so tea eggs are popular in Asia and will soon catch on here; I just know it. Consider this your special access pass, hipsters.

From that linked article on why eggs should figure prominently in your diet!

2) I grew up with these. When my family immigrated to Ohio fourteen years ago (wow!), we struggled with the American diet. I remember vividly one morning when my mom, whose fledgling English hardly challenged her chops in the kitchen, pulled a container from her bag of groceries and we sounded out the words together: "I Can't Believe It's Not Butter." We didn't know whether to believe it was butter, or not butter, or whether suspending disbelief was an American thing to do and gosh it was just some thing we felt culturally obligated to buy to spread on the white bread we didn't find particularly palatable either. So we gave up on the butter-or-not project and made a pot of these instead. The anise scent and gorgeous surface web designs comforted us that morning, and they still comfort me to this day. Through my teenage rebellion and self-initiated, regrettable desire to be "less Chinese," I would still sneak these into my lunches. When I hold one now, I'm reminded of home, of a return to intuitions, and that always fills me up.

3) These will fill you up and make you smarter. OK fine, verdict's out on the latter, but that's what my mom has always told me and I like my brains. They do useful things for me. I did a cross-search for these and turned up another blog that had featured them as a "low carb" snack option. Another hit was, delightfully, a bodybuilding forum! Eat tea eggs...get big. In summary, these are really good for you and I plan to make a big pot before hammering out four research papers later this term.

Ok! Now that I've convinced you to at least give eggs another chance, let me detail what it takes to bring eggs to a whole new level. Tea-egg-making is as fun as Easter, as easy as boiling pasta, and as accidentally and unexpectedly beautiful as Nathan Adrian.

You will need: a carton of eggs, salt, loose-leaf tea, star anise, tinfoil (optional), timer

Add 10-12 eggs to a medium, deep pot and cover with water. Bring to a boil and let simmer for 10 minutes.

15% of my diet right there

Also can we acknowledge how epic protein denaturation is?? Taking something that's gloopy and making it DELICIOUS with just HEAT?

Here's where you might need to do a quick grocery run. You shouldn't have to cross more than one Chinatown block to find this, though.

Star anise is a common ingredient in East Asian dishes, and is even a component of garam masala! Its scientific name is illicium verum, which I will use going forward because it makes this entire process sound illicit [2]. OOoOooO. My kinda Breaking Bad.

Feel free to pull this up on your phone and show the grocer. I can't read that, either.

Add a palmful of star anise pieces to a plop of loose-leaf tea. A plop, in case you were wondering, is an amount somewhere between a tablespoon and a ladle-full. Trust me, the plop unit will never fail you. This is optional: Loosely ball the anise and tea leaves into tinfoil, so that the whole unit can slowly collapse into boiling water. This helps concentrate the flavoring and acts as a diffuser of sorts in the pot.

Now comes the fun part. Turn off the stove, lift the eggs from the water into a separate bowl, and submerge in cold water in preparation for...cracking them! Have at it. Really break those shells, but leave them on the egg!! The more finely cracked they are, the prettier your final patterns will be, and the more flavorful the eggs will be.

Return cracked eggs to the same pot with the plop of anise+tea. Add a handful of salt to the pot.

Bring to boil and simmer for 20 minutes. Turn off stove and let eggs steep for one hour or, ideally, overnight.

Remove egg from its delicious spice bath. Study its unique crack-pattern. It's like the snowflake of the food world. No two tea eggs will ever look the same.

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A few final words about tea eggs:

They will grow on you. At first, you may wonder what the big deal is. The tea bath makes the traditional hard-boiled egg saltier and with a definite fragrance, but beyond that, its effects are subtle. But really savor the egg and consider how the flavor even altered the texture of the yolk. That's some serious infusion.
Try them warm and cold, whole and piecemeal. Vendors in Asia sell these cold the day after they make them, but I prefer them a little warm. Chopping one up into a salad also eliminates the need for dressing!
Once you're addicted, step away from the pot. Transfer the eggs in their bath to a separate container. No need to refrigerate unless you think they will last more than 2 days. In our house, they never do.