Chinese Tea Eggs



Tea eggs are one of my favorite ways to cook eggs. Not only do they make an amazing presentation, but they taste good too.

My brother went home for the weekend recently. Which means only one thing when he came back: lots of food from mom, including these Chinese tea eggs. I know how to make the eggs myself and have made them before, but most of the time I’m lazy. It’s not hard to make, but it does require a lot of waiting while the eggs stew to develop flavor.



Tea leaves, anise and other spices are boiled with the eggs creating a savory hard-boiled egg. Eggs are first hard-boiled. Then the shell is cracked in several places before the eggs stew in a pot of tea leaves, five spice powder, soy sauce, salt. As the eggs stew, the tea sauce seeps through, staining the white skin of the eggs. Because of the cracks in the shells, it creates this beautiful marbled pattern when you eventually peel off the shell.



Because these take so long to make, it’s best to make a large pot. They usually can last close to a week in the fridge. We recently discovered that if you keep the eggs in their shell and in an egg carton in the fridge they somehow last longer. I don’t know the explanation. I just know it works. We used to keep them in containers together but they would go bad within a few days. But for some reason placing them in the original egg cartons works.



Here’s my mom’s recipe: