🇸🇬 SingaporeCatalog recipe · Chinatown
Charcoal-grilled toast sandwiching cold butter and coconut-egg jam, dunked into soy-and-white-pepper soft-boiled eggs — Singapore's coffee-shop breakfast in three components.
For 4 servings.
No reviews yet
Cooked this? Be the first to tell everyone how it went.
Sign in to rate and review this recipe.
Sign in to suggest corrections and improvements.
Community posts are opinions, not professional advice. Community guidelines
Videos belong to their creators and play on their platform’s terms — Cibora never re-hosts third-party video.
Buy these ingredients
Links open each store’s own site, where you see their live local prices. Our cost figures in the app are estimates only.
Whisk the coconut milk, sugar and 3 eggs together in a heatproof bowl; set it over a pot of gently simmering water without the bowl touching the water.
Add the pandan knot and stir slowly and constantly until the mixture thickens into a spreadable jam, 20–25 minutes.
💡 Kaya scrambles if the water underneath boils hard — keep it at the barest simmer and never stop stirring.
Strain the kaya through a sieve if it's at all lumpy, then let it cool.
Lower the remaining 8 eggs gently into a pot of simmering water and cook exactly 5 minutes for a jammy, barely-set soft boil.
💡 Shock them briefly in cold water after — it stops the cooking and makes them far easier to crack open.
Toast or griddle the bread on a dry pan until deeply golden, close to charred at the edges.
Spread kaya thickly on one slice, lay the cold butter across the other, and sandwich them together hot so the butter just melts.
Crack the soft-boiled eggs into small bowls, season with soy sauce and white pepper, and dunk the toast fingers straight in.
Hainanese immigrants who worked as cooks on British ships and in colonial households brought back the idea of jam on toast and remade it with coconut and egg, since dairy was harder to come by. The result became the anchor of the kopitiam, or coffee shop, alongside a cup of thick filtered coffee. Dunking the toast into a bowl of soy-and-pepper soft-boiled eggs remains a small daily ritual for many Singaporeans before work.
Sign in to join the discussion. Reading is open to everyone.
Nothing here yet — questions about technique, timing, and substitutions all welcome.
No suggestions yet. Spotted a wrong quantity, a missing step, or a better technique? Suggest it — accepted changes join the recipe’s version history.