Tokneneng is a popular Filipino street food made from fried boiled chicken eggs, coated in an orange-red batter. It is served with a dipping sauce, and is an inexpensive and filling meal. It can be easily made at home with basic ingredients and a flavorful dipping sauce.
Tokneneng is a very popular Filipino street food made from fried boiled chicken eggs. A similar food to tempura, it is easily confused with kwek-kwek, which follows the same basic recipe but uses quail eggs instead. Tokneneng is easily made by dipping chicken eggs in an orange-red batter and frying them until the coating is crispy. It is sold on moving carts alongside fish balls, squid balls and kwek-kwek.
Since the basic dish consists only of fried eggs which don’t have much flavor, the deliciousness of Tokneneng comes from the dipping sauce used. Some prefer a spicy vinegar-based dip, while others use a sweet chili or puffer sauce. Any rich sweet and sour sauce complements crispy eggs well. Tokneneng is a very inexpensive yet hearty dish that is quite filling as a meal.
Sometimes also made with duck eggs, Tokneneng is a good meal for kids who like to have deep-fried fried eggs for lunch. If packaged as a lunch, the dipping sauce should be packaged separately to ensure the eggs remain crispy on the outside. It can be made very easily at home along with a flavorful dipping sauce.
The basic ingredients besides eggs are cornmeal, flour and oil. Cooks boil the eggs and remove the shells before dipping them in the batter. They mix some cornmeal with salt, pepper and red food coloring to make dough and mix well until all the lumps are dissolved. The cook coats the shelled egg with the batter and drops it into a wok with hot oil.
They fry the eggs coated in batter and set them aside to drain on paper towels when done. Cooks can use skewers to pierce and drop eggs into hot oil. Instead of using food coloring, cooks can also use annatto seeds. They put these seeds, which are brick-red in color, into some water and wait until the water turns red. They use this colored water to mix cornmeal with salt and pepper.
To make a base sauce, cooks can use a combination of rice vinegar, soy sauce, ketchup, and brown sugar. They heat all the ingredients together until the sugar dissolves completely in the sauce. To make a more complex sauce, cooks can use some onion, cucumber and a few pieces of ensiled labuyo, a very hot chili pepper. They boil these ingredients except the cucumber together with the vinegar and coarse salt until well blended. They serve the Tokeneneng with the dipping sauce garnished with finely chopped cucumber pieces.
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