Steamy Kitchen's Chinese Tea Eggs

Hey everyone. Welcome to Garden Fork. It’s Valentines Day today. I had a little Valentines Day moment this morning and I want to show you some cool things that she got me here, and she got me the Mark Bittman Book, “Food Matters”, which I think is really good and she got an Expo, a selection of different honeys. because you know, we are really into bee keeping now. We’re learning all about it and we had a little honey tasting this morning. So, we’re talking about food and we’re talking about love because it’s Valentines Day. And we’re going to do a recipe for my friend Jaden who has a blog called Steamy Kitchen. She cooks mainly to focus on Asian foods and her blog is a bunch of great recipes. She’s a really great photographer and she talks about food and love a lot, and I thought that that was appropriate. You know, steamy and kitchen, you know, love and food. That kind of thing. So, I thought that we would make a recipe that I can even make, which are called—they’re the Chinese New Year tea eggs. And, I’ve seen these a couple of times and she has a really neat recipe for it and I want to show you how to do it. Look, I’ve all prepared. I have things and little containers and everything here and I’ve read the recipe. So the first thing that you have to do is we’re going to start to hard boil these eggs. So, we’re just going to put them in a pot and boil. Get your matches out, and we’re going to bring this up to a simmer and cook them for about five minutes. Well, that’s the first part. You don’t want this to be a raging boil because it cracks the eggs and the egg gets out, it looks like a little balloon puffing out of the egg and all of that. Well, we’re going to bring it up to a simmer and then simmer them for five minutes. So when the simmer happens, then I’ll set the timer because I’ll forget otherwise. Alright. In the meantime, let’s sample honey. So, this is a blueberry honey that Lynn got me. And, I just want to do a little honey information here, if you call it. When it says like blueberry honey, it doesn’t taste like blueberries and so is the fruit, it tastes like blueberry flowers, the pollen of the plant. So let’s see what that tastes like by the way. It’s a beautiful honey. It doesn’t really taste a lot like blueberries, but that tastes great. It’s really a nice full flavor. You should try and buy local food, especially honey and things like that if possible because honey that’s not labeled with its origin or where it comes from, there are other countries that allows some pretty dangerous chemicals to be used on their beehives and things. You know, pesticides or fumigants. Well, we have to sample it. We have to get the full flavor of it. I’m serious, if you can buy local honey, do it. From foreign countries are not bad enough at all, but some countries don’t have a stricter law as we do about food production, so I’m just saying. This is much lighter. It’s kind of more in the top of your mouth. It’s more aromatic, but they’re both great. These are coming to a simmer so we’re going to set our timer for five minutes. Time’s up. So, we’re going to take these out. I’ve got some ice cubes here. Now, I’m going to take this and put cold water in here. So one thing is, don’t pour out the hot water that you simmered the eggs with because we’re going to use that as a brine or a marinate or to simmer things. What you want to do with these is you want to crack the shells without breaking them apart. You don’t want to crack and open it. You just want to get a bunch of little cracks in the shell like tap it. Because then, the soy sauce tea mixture we have is going to seep in which we haven’t talked about yet. Okay. So now we’ve cracked our eggs, we’re going to take our simmering water that’s still hot here and we’re going to put a couple of things in here. First of all, we’re going to put in black tea and I’m using regular tea bags. We’re going to take three of these and put them in the hot water. And then we’re going to take some star anise. So we put two of those in there. That’s a pretty strong flavor. And then we take three quarters of a cup of soy sauce that goes in here, a piece of cinnamon stick here. So Jaden’s recipe calls for a teaspoon of sugar. And I thought, since we have honey, why not put honey in it. This is Willy’s, our local honey. So I put in a very large teaspoon. You can put in peppercorns or dried orange peel, but we don’t have any. The recipe that we’re going to put on will be Jaden’s from her blog, so we’ll have those on there. So now, the eggs go in here. Now, this goes back on the stove and we’re going to simmer it for 40 minutes. So what we’re making here are called Chinese Tea Eggs and they are these kind of marbled hard boiled eggs that have a really neat black lines through them. So, they’re hard boiled eggs that are cooked with some tea, some anise and some other flavorings, and they are signifying nuggets or golden money basically. We could all use some golden nuggets right now. It’s a fun little recipe, I think it’s good for kids to get turned on to cooking as well. Go on and try it out. So now, this simmers for 40 minutes and then we’re going to put it in the fridge and let it marinate overnight. Alright, we’re having a nice morning and we left our eggs overnight in the refrigerator in the pot here. So, let’s see what happened here. Look at that, look at those lines. They look like marbled eggs, look at that. I mean, if you put too big of a hole, then you get that. I think what causes the really deeper lines is you’re hard boiling the egg, and then we’re cracking the egg and we need to crack the white part of the egg as well so that the marinate or—I don’t know what you call this—the sauce gets in and stains it dark like that. Look at that. Oh! That’s beautiful. That’s great. And look at the shell. If you break too much of the shell, you see what happens here. Wow! There’s like this tea licorice flavor mixed with the hard boiled egg and some soy sauce in there too. Try to do that. Come to Green-House.TV. Alright, see you later. Bye.