Tea Eggs

01

An egg that cooks twice, with its shell cracked

A tea egg is a hard-boiled egg with its shell cracked so the brine can paint the white.

The method has two steps. The eggs are boiled in their shells until firm, then the shells are tapped all over with the back of a spoon or rolled gently on a board until they are covered in fine cracks but still in place. The cracked eggs go back into a pot of tea, salt, soy sauce or caramel and spices, simmer for half an hour or more, and then sit in the liquid for hours, ideally overnight. The brine seeps through the cracks into the white, so when the shell is peeled the egg is marbled with a network of brown lines, darker where the cracks were widest, and the yolk is seasoned all the way through.

It is one of the humblest dishes in Chinese cooking. The writer Wang Zengqi listed tea eggs with fried peanuts, five-spice chestnuts and boiled soybeans as the drinking snacks that anyone can make, and in an essay about tea admitted that the tea leaves too poor to drink were saved for tea eggs. They are eaten for breakfast with congee or soy milk, as a snack on a long train journey, with tea, or bought hot from a convenience-store pot on the way to work.

Sources [3][12]

02

Yuan Mei’s hundred eggs and two sticks of incense

The oldest written tea-egg recipe is three lines long.

Yuan Mei, the Qing poet whose Suiyuan Shidan of 1792 is the most quoted Chinese cookbook, included tea eggs among the small dishes. His recipe is a hundred eggs boiled with one liang of salt and coarse tea leaves, for as long as it takes two sticks of incense to burn; for fifty eggs, use half the salt, and adjust from there. The dish, Yuan Mei added, can be served as a dianxin, a snack between meals. There is no soy sauce, no sugar and no spice in it, only salt and cheap tea, and time measured the way a kitchen without clocks measured it.

Yuan Mei used incense sticks to time several slow dishes, a mushroom chicken stewed in sweet wine and a dry-steamed duck among them, so “two sticks of incense” meant a long, gentle cook rather than a quick boil. Later cooks added soy sauce, star anise and sugar, and the 五香, “five-spice,” tea egg became the usual version.

Sources [1][5]

03

How tea eggs are made: tea, star anise and patience

The brine needs only a few things, and a night to work.

A popular home recipe for twenty eggs uses only one spice, three star anise pods, cracked. Fifty grams of rock sugar is cooked in a little water until it turns into a light caramel, then boiling water goes in with the star anise, and the eggs, washed and gently tapped on the broad end, are boiled for ten minutes. Fifteen grams of black tea and twenty of salt are added; the eggs are lifted out, cracked all over on a cloth, and returned to the brine in a clay pot to simmer for half an hour. Black tea gives the deepest color; the cook warns against soaking eggs overnight in an iron pot, which the brine will spoil. After about three hours they are colored and edible; the next day they are at their best, and they keep several days in the fridge.

The tea is a matter of taste. The Shanghai food writer Shen Jialu notes that most people make five-spice tea eggs with ordinary green tea, and recommends Xiping oolong from Fujian instead, for a lingering orchid fragrance.

Sources [2][12]

04

Tea eggs around China

The same egg turns up at a riverside stall, an old teahouse and a fast-food counter.

Shen Jialu quotes the essayist Shi Kangqiang remembering the five-spice tea egg stalls along the Qinhuai River by Nanjing’s Confucius Temple, and caring less for the eggs than for the squares of pressed tofu simmered in the same pot, which soaked up the brine and chewed better than the eggs. In Shanghai, the Huxinting teahouse in the Yu Garden serves a standard set of four tea snacks: five-spice broad beans, pressed tofu, thumb-sized ham zongzi tied with thirteen turns of red thread, and tea eggs made with quail eggs, because a hen’s egg is too big for a teahouse plate.

Everywhere else, tea eggs are breakfast. In Henan in 2022 a four-yuan breakfast was a bowl of hulatang, a bowl of tofu pudding, pan-fried buns and a tea egg, one yuan each. KFC put tea eggs on its China breakfast menu, at 5.5 yuan in 2022, beside congee, youtiao and hot dry noodles. In Taiwan, convenience stores sell them from steaming pots by the till; when egg prices rose in 2022, FamilyMart raised its tea eggs from NT$10 to NT$13, while OK Mart kept them at NT$10 and 7-Eleven said it had no plans to follow.

Sources [2][7][13][14]

05

The companion in the pot: tea-cooked tofu

Where there is a tea-egg pot, there is often tofu in it too.

The brine that colors eggs also makes 茶干, tea-cooked pressed tofu, a snack in its own right in the Yangtze delta. Shen Jialu describes a family habit: supermarket pressed tofu cut in quarters and cooked in the pot with the five-spice tea eggs, the son peeling the eggs while the writer ate the tofu. One Spring Festival Shen found that tofu left in a draft became chewier and more fragrant, and began stringing the cooked squares on thread and hanging them by a north window overnight, then warming them briefly before eating. Wang Zengqi, from Gaoyou in Jiangsu, remembered the tea-dried tofu of Jieshou near Gaoyou, each piece a little smaller than a palm.

Sources [2][3]

06

“Missile builders earn less than tea-egg sellers”

The tea egg is so cheap that Chinese people use it to talk about money.

At one time a saying went around China: 造导弹的不如卖茶叶蛋的, “those who build missiles earn less than those who sell tea eggs.” It was a complaint about the pay of scientists and engineers, and a street vendor with a pot of eggs was the sharpest comparison anyone could think of. Zhong Shan, chief designer of the Hongqi-7 air-defense missile, was asked about it on CCTV in 2018, at the age of 87. His test crews had their own rhyme, “work for Zhong Shan and you’ll be broke.” He did not dispute it: their wages, he said, really were less than what selling tea eggs brought in, and they worked flat out anyway.

The egg came back as a joke in March 2014, when a professor in Taiwan claimed that many people on the mainland could not afford tea eggs. They sold for about 15 to 30 US cents in cities such as Beijing and Shanghai at the time, and the remark became one of the most talked-about subjects on the Chinese internet that week. In Guangzhou a businessman, Yu Ying, went out and handed tea eggs out across town; the iFeng report on it put the number at 100,000.

Sources [8][9]

07

The convenience-store egg

In Taiwan the tea egg became a retail product, and a price worth reporting.

Taiwan’s first 7-Eleven opened in 1980, and the stores struggled to break even at first. Profits rose in the 1990s, when the local operator began selling food for local tastes, tea eggs among them. The American parent company worried that the eggs would smell too strong; they quickly became a bestseller. By 2016 Taiwan’s Central News Agency could call them an item unique to Taiwanese convenience stores, and it ran the news when 7-Eleven, then just over 5,000 stores, raised the price from NT$8 to NT$10 that January, blaming a 25 percent rise in farm egg prices over five years.

Sources [10][11]

08

Why the yolk goes gray-green

A tea egg stays in hot liquid far longer than an ordinary boiled egg, so its yolk often has a dull rim.

The rim is ferrous sulfide. As an egg cooks, sulfur from the white reacts with iron in the yolk at the surface where they meet; the longer and hotter the cooking, the more forms. It is harmless, and a question of looks and a faint sulfur smell. An egg left simmering in a shop pot all day will show it most. At home the fix is the method above: keep the boiling short and let the egg take its color from a long soak off the heat.

Sources [6]

09

Tea eggs, braised eggs and tiger-skin eggs

China has several ways of turning a boiled egg into something else; the tea egg is the one that keeps its shell on.

A tea egg is cooked and soaked in its cracked shell, so it ends up marbled. A braised egg, 卤蛋, is peeled first and simmered in a soy-based braise until the whole surface is evenly brown. A tiger-skin egg, 虎皮蛋, is peeled, deep-fried until the white blisters and wrinkles like a tiger’s hide, and then braised, usually with red-braised pork. In Shanghai the two go together: the restaurant reviewer Huang Qifang, writing about a benbang red-braised pork, noted that the quail eggs beside it had been cooked the tea-egg way and would have been better as tiger-skin eggs, which are the classic partner for the pork. The tea egg is the plainest of the three, and the only one that is a snack on its own, as Yuan Mei already described it.

Sources [1][4]

10

How to buy and eat tea eggs

A tea egg is the simplest thing on any breakfast counter.

Sources [2][12]

11

What a tea egg costs

From one yuan to a little over five.

Sources [7][8][10][13][14]

12

More on the atlas

Other preserved eggs and breakfasts.