The most delicious Eggettes recipe.

Eggettes

Eggettes is the Hong Kong style waffle and you can found it at every night market at Hong Kong. But about the delicious eggettes, you have to know how to cook it by following its recipe. So here we show the 'secret recipe' of eggettes for you.

 This was my introduction to eggettes, a classic Hong Kong street food. Like most street food, they taste best seconds after they’ve been handed to you by the vendor. Crisp on the outside, soft and fluffy on the inside, it’s like bubble wrap made of cake, and pulling off the individual “eggs” affords a satisfaction akin to popping the little bubbles on bubble wrap. The Chinese name, daan jai or gai daan jai, literally translates to “little eggs”, which is what the treat resembles, although somewhere along the way someone came up with the much catchier name “eggettes.” Eggettes became one of my and my sisters’ favourite things to eat in Hong Kong, and every time we’ve returned, we keep one eye open for a eggette stall every time we step outside.

Doing a quick survey of fellow Hong Kongers, I discovered that many of them have similarly strong childhood memories of eggettes. It speaks to the enduring appeal of this simple treat that even in fad-obsessed Hong Kong, eggette stalls can still be found everywhere, their recipe virtually unchanged. Only in recent years as eggette stands have opened up in malls and food courts (here in the Bay Area, there is a Chinese snack shop near my home named, quite simply, Eggettes), has this snack began to show signs of modernising. Now there are a menu’s worth of flavors, from matcha to red bean to chocolate, and they are served with fruit and whipped cream, crepe-style.

If you go to a traditional street vendor, though, who’s still making his wares on the same iron pans he’s used for years, chances are they still only make one flavor – original. And to these veterans, that’s the only flavor necessary. Eggettes are one of the truest street foods: not meant to be fancy, trendy, or gussied up, but something you can buy on a whim and enjoy completely and simply, while you’re walking in the crowd.

For the longest time, eggettes were only bought outside and never made at home; why bother when you could buy them for so cheap from a master who’d been making them his whole life? But never underestimate enterprising foodies: with the metal molds to make eggettes easily found, many foodies decided to try making them at home.