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This is a classy blog with standards, so there will be absolutely no puns about the eggsperiences of an eggciting eggsperiment with tea.
Mere tea eggs are too easy for an industrious Sunday afternoon, so to kick up the flavor a notch, this blog decided to smoke the eggs. After all, is it not written: “Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em”?
To begin, you first hard-boil a batch of eggs. There is no standard recipe (other than boil water, insert egg, wait, plunge in cold water) as a wiseman once said: “The stove is woman. She’s a mean bitch who will stab you in the back the moment you’re not looking, so you have to learn her and know her every move and temperament”.
One thing about hard-boiled eggs with runny yolks: because they are still very soft, a lot of care is required when de-shelling them. The standard way of rolling them across the table top only results in a mess. I did the quail eggs version, it was so painful that I ended up eating them with a straw. So to answer Daphne‘s question of whether I can get tea-smoked eggs with runny yolks, the answer is yes, but it’s a pain to de-shell. Especially with short fingernails. Do share your eggshell-peeling tricks.
Next is the soak; this is where you soak the eggs in a liquor made from many herbs and spices. There are two ways of doing this: buy a prepackaged bag of herbs and spices from an Apothecary or you can, like this blog, do your own mix.
Well of course I did my own mix; that’s because I was going for a particular flavor profile. What went in the pot was a very thick Oolong tea (it’s smokey, alternatively you may use Longjing for a fuller taste), a pinch of 5-spice powder (this is strong stuff, so be sparing), sesame oil (not too much) and very good Soy Sauce.
The Soy Sauce is important to me, so I used my own blend of premium Kikkoman soy sauce mixed with Ginseng Chicken Broth (about 7:3 ratio). I discovered this blend when my mom cooked Herbal Chicken with Ginseng (when we were kids) and as I dipped the chicken (with some broth spilled in) in soy sauce, after a while, the soy sauce tasted very very good. So I tend to save the soy sauce for use over a few days.
Once you’ve got the marinade to the correct taste, put the eggs in for an hour or so, stirring occasionally to make sure every surface gets coated. Yes, the marinade should be cool before you put in the eggs.
Technically, after an hour or so, you get tea eggs. It’s edible, savory and good. But seriously, we want tea-smoked eggs.
Filter and save some of the marinade.
So…, line your wok (or a strong pot but not cast-iron) with foil. Make sure the foil overlaps the edge of the wok as you want to form a seal with the cover.
The smoke mix is your standard rice, sugar and tea (ratio of 3:1:1) except that I find white sugar produces a more acrid taste, so I used brown sugar instead. Put the mix into the foil-lined wok, cover the wok and turn on to high heat.
Karl Dobler of Au Petit Salut noted that while you can use induction stoves to do smoking, it takes longer (some may not work because of the foil) and more importantly, induction stove-smoking gives, according to him, a “strange taste”.
Of course, at this juncture, you should have all windows open and fans work at high-speed.
Once you see a small wisp of smoke, you may place the eggs on a steamer inside. If you don’t have a steamer (which is hard to believe in an Asian kitchen), you can use chopsticks like this.
Seal the wok and the cover with the overlapping foil and wait. For chicken eggs, it’s 2-4 minutes.
There’ll be very little smoke if you do a good seal but after 3 minutes (that’s how long I did it), you get deliciously tea-smoked eggs.
I served the tea-smoked eggs cold, in a pool of the filtered marinade. There was a smokey sweetness that added a lot of depth to the savory tea eggs. The finish, according to my co-workers (who make good guinea pigs taste subjects), was very long and some could taste the dry “Kam” sensation in the mouth.
This is something I would serve, in a non-office environment, with a nice Billecart-Salmon NV Rose or the feminine Perrier-Jouët Brut or heck, a beer. I mean, what could be better?
Eggsactly.
Posted on 7th Sep 2009 in Chinese, Food and Drink, Fun, Recipes
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Another item we found in Kanazawa were sweets made from the eggs of the ukkokei (silkie bantam)..JPG)
And the custard pudding...420 yen (about US$4.20) each.
Kagawa Prefecture, Japan
already crossed the 
100,000 marks.
