Egg tart

File:Tai Cheong Bakery HK.jpg

The queue leading to the newly-reopened Tai Cheong's Bakery (far right).

Egg tart is a type of pastry found in Chinese cuisine. It consists of a flaky outer crust, with a middle filled with egg custard, which is then baked. Egg tarts are typically marketed at Chinese bakeries and cha chaan tengs (tea restaurant), and some dim sum restaurants. The second character in the Chinese name is a character that closely resembles 'tart' in pronunciation, while the first is Chinese for 'egg'. This food is a unique product of Hong Kong's colonisation to Britain, through the interaction of Chinese, British and Portuguese culture.

Chris Patten, the last British Governor of Hong Kong before the transition to China in 1997, was known in Hong Kong popular culture to be fond of this pastry. He particularly enjoyed the egg tarts sold at Tai Cheong Bakery (TC:泰昌餅家; see external links below), and thus the eggs tarts sold at the bakery became known as "Fei-Paang egg tarts" (肥彭蛋達; lit. Fat Patten's Egg Tart, "Fat Patten" being the governor's nickname in Cantonese). The story still remains popular among Hongkongers. In subsequent visits he makes a routine stop to help himself to his favourite Hong Kong specialty.

It should be noted that while supermarkets in the United Kingdom, such as Sainsbury's and Tesco, produce a variation of the tarts, their products are quite different from what most Hongkongers regard as 'authentic'.

Today's tarts come in many variations due to Hongkongers' eagerness to try almost anything. These include egg white tarts, milk tarts, ginger juice tarts, chocolate tarts and even "birds' nest" tarts.

Hong Kong-style

An egg tart

Hong Kong-style egg tarts have two main varieties, divided according to the type of the outermost layer or crust:

• Butter-flavoured (牛油皮, pinyin: Niuyoupi, literally, "Cow oil skin"): has a more continous and smooth outermost layer. It possesses a cookie-like flavour with a rich butter aroma.
• Crispy (酥皮, pinyin: Supi, literally "Crispy skin"): has layers of thin pastry giving it a extremely crisp texture. Lard is typically used in making the base.

Portuguese-style

Portuguese-style egg tarts actually originated from Coloane, Macao, and had been available at the Hong Kong branches of the KFC restaurant chain. There was a craze in Singapore in the late 1990s. Macau-style restaurants are also common to provide Portuguese-style egg tarts.

See also

• Pastry
• Dim sum

External links

• A Ming Pao report on the last business day (25/5/2005) of Tai Cheong's Bakery. The bakery was able to rent another stall, situated just opposite to the original stall, and was reopened in October 2005.
• AVBuzz.com, a Hong Kong-based online photographic society, has its photographs capturing the crowds around Tai Cheong's Bakery.