Tea egg

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This article is about the Chinese egg-based snack. Tea egg is sometimes also used to refer to a Tea infuser.

Tea egg (Traditional Chinese: 茶葉蛋; pinyin: chá yè dàn; literally "tea leaf egg") is a typical Chinese savory snack commonly sold by street vendors or in night markets in most Chinese communities throughout the world.

In Taiwan, tea eggs are a fixture of convenience stores. Through 7-Eleven chains alone, an average of 40 million tea eggs are sold per year. The price of tea eggs in convenience stores also serve as an important price index. In north-east China and Hong Kong, tea eggs are often privately made and sold; one might also see street vendors cooking and selling steaming-hot tea eggs. In Shanghai, tea eggs are sold by both convenience stores and private street vendors, where the tea eggs are often cooked together with dried tofu.

Tea eggs are simply hard boiled eggs that have been further stewed in a salted tea liquid. Other flavourings such as soy sauce and Chinese five-spice powder are often added as well. The egg is actually boiled twice. After the first boil, when the insides are harder, the shell of each egg is lightly cracked without peeling, then the eggs are further boiled. This serves the dual purpose of letting the flavour of the tea into the egg, while colouring the surface egg white with a blurry cracked pattern that is somewhat reminiscent of marble.

The tea used in making tea eggs are usually low in quality but high in dark brown tannins. Green tea leaves are considered too bitter for the use of making tea eggs.

Typical ingredients for the stewing liquid include:

• Oolong tea leaves
• Minced black tea leaves
• Star anise
• Sichuan peppers
• Soy sauce
• Salt
• Sugar

[edit] References

• 陳富春. (2004). “小楊桃系列-003. 茶葉蛋”. 楊桃文化. ISBN 978-986-7853-58-5