This Recipe for Sweet and Savory Boiled Eggs Brings Me Back to My Childhood in Singapore

In Singapore, where I grew up, there was a tea egg stall next to the train station near my home, and the intoxicating smell of soy sauce, tea leaves, and warm spices often enticed me to buy an egg for the walk home. The snack—which consists of hard-boiled eggs that are typically marinated in a fragrant mixture of soy sauce, tea, and warm spices like cassia bark or cinnamon, cloves, and star anise—is common in many parts of Asia, including Taiwan and Hong Kong. After the eggs cook, people tap the shells with a spoon to form a fine web of hairline cracks that allow the liquid to seep through, producing the egg’s signature marbled look when peeled. 

Most culinary historians believe that tea eggs originated in China, where legend has it that during the Qing dynasty, people boiled eggs in a pot of tea for convenience—why make tea and eggs in separate pots when you could make them together in the same pot? As tea-boiled eggs became more popular, those who could not afford expensive tea leaves made up for using low-quality tea leaves by infusing the tea leaves  into a master stock or braising liquid rather than water. 

I now live in the Netherlands, where there are no tea eggs to be found unless you make them yourself. Luckily for me, they’re easy to make—and with my recipe below, you can recreate this classic snack at home.

The Best Tea to Use for the Marinade

The steeping liquid for the eggs generally consists of loose leaf oolong tea, soy sauce, brown sugar, ginger, and spices, though the exact combination used varies from place to place and cook to cook. Because tea is the most dominant flavor here, using high-quality loose-leaf tea—which is more robust and nuanced than most bagged teas—is essential. The type of tea can vary: many tea egg traditionalists recommend black tea, oolong is often used in Taiwan, and some prefer jasmine tea for its floral profile. Pu-erh is a great choice if you want to use black tea, and I’ve used both Tie Guan Yin, an oolong tea, and Xiang Pian, a fragrant mixture of green tea leaves and jasmine blossoms. Both worked well: The Tie Guan Yin eggs were subtly smoky, while the Xiang Pian eggs had delicate floral notes. Ultimately, you can use whichever tea that you like; what matters more than the kind of tea you use is its quality. While some believe that the type of tea affects the colour of the tea eggs (the darker the tea, the darker the eggs), its effect on the color of the eggs is fairly minimal; rather, how much soy sauce you use in the marinade is a more important factor.

How to Achieve the Signature Marbled Look

I use a combination of light and dark Chinese soy sauces in the marinating liquid, both because the dark soy sauce  gives the eggs a darker hue and because they have different flavor profiles, so using them both gives the eggs a more nuanced flavor. If you don’t have dark soy sauce, though, you could just use light soy sauce. I do recommend using Chinese or Chinese-style soy sauce for both the dark and light soy sauces since their flavors are different from other soy sauces, such as Japanese ones. 

To give the eggs their distinct marbled appearance, it’s essential to create well-defined cracks that will allow the liquid to seep through. In my experience, the best way to do this is by using  the back of a spoon to carefully crack the eggs all over. You don’t want to apply so much pressure that large spaces form between the shell and the egg (this produces patches of dark brown rather than the desired mottled effect), but you do want well-defined cracks for the liquid to seep through. While some believe that tea eggs have to be boiled in the marinade to fully infuse it with flavor and color, I’ve found that steeping it in the marinade for at least 24 hours achieves the same effect. 

Making a batch of these eggs takes me straight back to my childhood. I can practically hear the rumble of the trains.

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