Fried Egg Tempra with Onions and Kecap Manis

As readers of my review of Good Eggs by Ed Smith will already know, I utterly adore eggs! If left to my own devices I might well eat eggs for breakfast, lunch and dinner every day, even though there are so many other delicious things to enjoy. This recipe is another from Shu Han Lee’s Agak Agak: Everyday Recipes from Singapore and is essentially a tempra recipe, this being a method for braising onions in a sweet soy sauce till they transform into a dark, sticky sauce. Lee also adds chilli for a little fiery heat, lime for a bit of tang, and coriander for a lovely fresh finish.

We find the tempra onions recipe makes enough to split between two of us, over two eggs each.

Read more about the book in our full review of Agak Agak: Everyday Recipes from Singapore by Shu Han Lee.

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Fried Egg Tempra with Onions and Kecap Manis

Tempra refers to the method of braising onions with sweet soy sauce. Chilli is added for heat, and lime for a refreshing tang. The simple ingredients transform into a sticky, zingy, caramel-like sauce. It’s a sauce that’s glorious spooned over anything and everything – in this instance (and in many other hungry instances), fried eggs.

Author Shu Han Lee

Ingredients

• 3 tbsp vegetable oil
• 2 large free-range eggs
• 1 small onion, sliced into ½ cm (¼ in) thick rounds
• 1–2 bird’s eye chillies, cut in half lengthwise
• 1 tbsp dark soy sauce
• 1 tbsp kecap manis
• about 2 tbsp water
• juice of ½ lime
• 2 sprigs of fresh coriander (cilantro)

Instructions

• Heat the oil in a small frying pan set over medium–high heat. Crack the eggs into the hot oil – you should see the oil bubbling around the whites from the start. Fry until the whites turn lacy and golden brown on the edges and are set around the yolk –you might want to spoon the hot oil over the whites to help them set. Remove the eggs from the pan with a spatula and set aside on your serving plate.
• Add the sliced onions to the remaining oil in the pan and fry until fragrant and golden. Now add the chillies, soy sauce, kecap manis and a small splash of the water to help deglaze the pan. Once bubbling, add a squeeze of lime juice, stir through, then pour the sauce over the fried eggs. Tear the coriander over to garnish and serve immediately.

Pete cooked this for lunch on a day we didn’t have fresh coriander or chillies in the house but even without, the tempra was a fantastic topping for fried eggs, served this day with a couple of leftover chipolata sausages.

Definitely one to make again and again!

Let us know if you make this. What did you think?

Find more Southeast Asian recipes, here. And for the egg lovers, find more egg recipes, here.

This recipe is extracted from Shu Han Lee’s Agak Agak: Everyday Recipes from Singapore cookbook and republished with permission from Hardie Grant. Book photography by Ola O. Smit. Home photography by Kavita Favelle.