Endless Thread - Endless Egg

Episode Date: May 22, 2026

Some Internet trends are temporary, but eggs are forever. Today, host Ben Brock Johnson serves up a story about a recipe that, according to the people of r/pickled, can't be beat, and producer Kalyani Saxena egg-splores online discourse around Korean mayak eggs, and why it matters which creators get credit for their popularity. Show notes: "Been a few years now. Figured I’d share my recipe." (r/pickling) The eggs so addictive authorities want to change their name (The Sydney Morning Herald) How a South Korean comfort food went global (BBC) "Marinade recipe" (@courtneylcook's TikTok) "we've officially lost the plot (@beefyboiii's TikTok) @princess.paulai on Courtney Cook's mayak egg content (TikTok) This episode was produced by Grace Tatter and researched and co-hosted by Kalyani Saxena and Ben Brock Johnson. It was edited by Dave Shaw and Meg Cramer. Mix and sound design by Paul Vaitkus.

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Is ESG just greenwashing? And, of course, is business broken? Listen, wherever you get your podcasts. WBUR Podcasts, Boston. Kalyani Saxana, producer of the show, Endless Thread, inside. of which we are right now. Yes. The show Endless Thread. We're inside. We're in the main frame.

We're in the main frame of Endless Thread. Yes. And today we're talking about one of the most recognizable shaped items of food. What's to say about it? Ovular? Ovular, yes, round. Kind of bouncy? No, I would not describe.

Depending on what stage we're talking about. What state it's in? What state it's in. Okay, we're talking about eggs. Are you an egg woman? I really do need to disclose that I'm not an egg lover. Okay. But I'm not an egg hater.

If an egg tastes too much like an egg, and some people who are listening to this, are going to know immediately what I'm talking about. It's done. Like, I'm not into it. I understand that perspective. I don't share it, but I understand it. So we got an email from a listener named Scott. Have you been following the U-S-slash as a...

user Heavy Tech 86 Pickle Saga on R slash Pickling. This dude's pickled eggs and sausage recipe has taken off, and lots of folks are making it and posting. Might be a rabbit hole to investigate peace. Let's start with Heavy Tech 86. As near as I can tell by creeping on his Reddit posts, his Reddit history, his username may give you a hint of this, Heavy Tech, right? So he works in some level of like industrial work.

So I know he talks about concrete slurry in some of his posts. He makes something called cowboy candy with his hot peppers from his garden, which is, I believe, pickled peppers. All right. So this is what Heavy Tech 86 is into. Just, you know, regular chill stuff about his life until you get to about a month ago from when we are taping this. And it's not actually that interesting. Like, it's not, when you see this post that went viral,

it's not like, oh, my God, of course, this went viral. So let me just, I'm going to copy the post that went viral. I'll send it to you. Okay. Yeah. I'm sorry. I just opened it, and I have to say, that's not, when I think of virality, I wouldn't have thought of this.

No, right? It doesn't, yeah. So if you want me to describe it. Yeah, it's like one of those really tall mason jars. There's a bunch of eggs in some sort of liquid. I'm presuming vinegar or some kind of brine. A bunch of like orangy carrot things and like a few peppers. But there's sausage in there too.

Oh, I see the sausage now. I thought those were potatoes. There's slices of sausage. So we're talking about pickled sausage and eggs. Which again, that's like doubly bold. That's a lot of animal protein inside of something that's not going to be cold necessarily. But what's crazy is when you look, I'm just like, look in the Pickling subreddit for a minute. I know.

Everybody is making it, dude. And they're still making it. They're still making it. We started talking about this weeks ago and people are still making it. This is basically this, this is now a sausage and pickles. eggs subreddit. It's not just a pickling subreddit, right? It's not a hostile takeover, but it is a takeover. Everyone is making heavy techs eggs. Some of these jars actually look beautiful. I know. I was just looking at one that I was like, okay, Instagram. It's beautiful. It's kind of art

of its own thing. It really is. And now, of course, like the memes are popping up. Dad, why is my sister's name Rose? Because your mother loves roses. Thanks, Dad. No problem. Heavy Tech. I don't know. It's just kind of fun and interesting how this one random dudes, Heavy Tech 86, his pickled eggs recipe blew up and now has like changed the face of the pickling subreddit. And everybody seems to be having a good old grand old time with it. Yeah. And what's interesting to me as well is like for some people, it's all they can think about. I mean, our editor, Meg Kramer, when we were talking about this story, said she hasn't been able to stop thinking about these pickled eggs since we've. first got that listener email. She hasn't even seen the nice pictures of the beautiful pickle bags.

She just saw like the original picture and she couldn't stop thinking about it. And like I can't say that that has been my experience. But I think that there's something really, I don't know, so much of the internet is so heavy. And the algorithm often like really favors content that elicits either like strong anger or like mostly strong anger. And so it's kind of cool to see this subreddit be taken over by an idea for something delicious that everybody is enjoying. I'm assuming delicious that everybody's enjoying. And everybody's having fun with it. And I don't know. I think that's kind of great.

It's nice. Has heavy tech responded or like come to rule their new kingdom? Like where is heavy tech in this? Heavy tech's around. Heavy tech's poking around. but heavy tech's not like I think it went viral enough and heavy tech is like a working human who apparently has kids yeah yeah he made his pickled eggs he's doing his thing no big deal I did reach out to him I have not heard back and if I do I will report back but that's my story about pickled eggs but you got a story about pickled eggs of some kind right

I have a story about eggs in liquid does that qualify as pickling or brazing find out after the break Yeah, why not? Why not? I'm Dean Russell, co-creator of WBUR's new family-friendly podcast, The Midnight Rebellion. This story transports you to a future shaped by climate change. The water is high, seaweed is everywhere, and the city is ruled by salty robots. The good news, you choose what happens. The decisions you make can turn the tide. All episodes are out now.

This summer, find your next great adventure at WBUR. or.org slash midnight or wherever you get your podcasts. All right. We're back and we're ready to dive in to some more excellent content. Nice. Okay, I promise that's my only egg-related pun for the rest of this episode. Oh boy. Don't make promises you can't keep.

That's true. It's more just like a failure and creativity. That's all I've got. Excellent is all I've got. That's just because you're a shell of your former self. Oh, that's good. That was fast, too. I'm proud of you for that one. Thanks, man. Well, so your, your ed story.

I had to scramble a little bit, you know what I mean? Stop! Am I going to be able to tell this story without laughing? Oh, I don't want to make you crack. Oh, my God. All right, that is your last one. All right, all right. I'll stop. Okay, so your egg story came from Reddit. Mine comes from TikTok.

I have been seeing these particular eggs on TikTok for years. They are boiled eggs. They're marinated in soy sauce. And then there's some other ingredients in that little marinade. You got green onions, sesame seeds, other onions. And then once you marinate them in that little mixture, when you eat them over rice, they look really jammy and pretty scrumdedly umptious. Nice. So people have referred to these eggs by different names on TikTok in the years that I've been seeing this. Jammy eggs, soy marinated eggs. And that sort of naming thing is kind of at the crux of the story, which we'll get to that in a minute. But they've actually got a specific name. They're called Mayak eggs and they're Korean marinated eggs. They're sometimes referred to as Korean drug eggs because they're so addictive. And, you know, the origin of this dish is suspected to be from China. But, you know,

Many other Asian countries have their own version of marinated eggs. Japan has a soy marinated egg that is used in ramen. And Taiwan and Vietnam also have their own version. So this is something that has been around on the internet for a while, but also like just in general culture for like hundreds of years. But the reason I wanted to talk about these eggs is that even though they've been showing up on my for you page for years, I noticed a pickup in just like the volume of videos about these myaq eggs late last year. And they started with videos from an influencer and content creator named Courtney Cook.

Okay. These are some of the marinated eggs. These are like the Korean Mayak eggs. I need to figure out how to pronounce that. I have some Japanese mayo. Oh my gosh. This is exactly what I need. And some french fried onions. This is so darn delicious. So Courtney is chomping on these eggs in the morning for her breakfast. She films a lot of videos of her just like she takes a bite out of the top of the egg, puts a little bit of crunchy onions and then sort of dives in.

And people, they love these videos from Courtney. And they start making their own version of the Mayak eggs. Only there's one problem. They're calling the eggs Courtney Cook's eggs. We're making Courtney Cook's soy-maninated eggs. Come with me to try Courtney's soy eggs. Or what are you eating? I'm eating marinated eggs, soy sauce, marinated eggs,

with a little dollop of mayo dipped in crispy onions. Who's this from? Courtney cook. Oh, man. I mean, it's a little. Is that, it's probably not Courtney's fault necessarily? I'm not saying she's completely innocent either. Yeah, and we're going to get into some opinions because I think it's kind of, it is a little bit of a murky picture.

But there was a lot of Asian American creators who were really unhappy about this because here they are seeing this egg. And yeah, like it's been called different things online before like jammy eggs, soy marinated eggs. But what's happening right now is that this recipe from their heritage is being attributed to a white creator. Like Courtney, this is her invention. This is her creation. Here's one creator who goes by the username at Kayla Wongton. She's responding to a video of a white woman who posted a video making the eggs with the text, quote, so chronically online and putting my hard-boiled eggs in a soy sauce bath. And then the caption of that video says, quote, in Courtney, we trust. What do you mean you're chronically online? So now you're making soy marinated eggs. As if like soy sauce and eggs is such a crazy combination to them.

And then they're not even giving credit to like Asian people. They're giving credit to Courtney Cook, which I love Courtney Cook. Like I always watch your videos, but just calling it her food with the caption saying, thank you for sharing your delicious food with us. Oh my God. And then here's one more clip I want to play. from a TikTok video by someone who goes by the username at Princess Pauli. And the problem I have with Courtney Kirk also is that she kind of in comments and videos

says that her food combinations are weird and that's what she says over and over. Yet your most popular videos are all the ones of you eating Asian food. And you want to keep saying things are weird. There's another layer here too that, you know, many Asian Americans who grew up in this country grew up having their food made fun of. Absolutely. Oh, that smells. Oh, that stinks.

I am well versed in what that experience is like. So to sort of see that food now being celebrated is great and as one thing. But I think that there's also a level of like pain and frustration seeing that food now that it's being celebrated attributed attributed to someone who isn't part of that community. I mean, it's just it was not going over very well on TikTok. There are some creators who felt differently that, you know, this is just kind of how food recipes are online. People appreciate food from other cuisines and they share videos of them making that recipe from that cuisine. This is one more person from TikTok. Their username is at Beefy Boy.

Oh, that's me. That's me. Except this creator identified themselves as a Korean who was raised in America. me. Never mind. It's not me. No, it's not you. Sorry about that. Why else are we in America? I'm talking to everybody. Do we need to learn the deep history behind every single thing we eat? No, we'll drive ourselves crazy researching everything before we eat it. But let's have respect for one another. Let's have respect for one another. Why can't we do that? I have plenty of thoughts about this, but I wanted to give you a chance if there's something that you're

thinking about hearing all this. It's this tricky thing where it's like you want people to be able to explore the world and to do that in a way that like they can feel safe doing that. And at the same time, you want people to educate themselves about the world that they're in. And in some ways, like that's the first step of the process. I love cooking. I cook a lot of Asian food. I cook a lot of Mexican food.

I make dumplings. I do all of those things and I think over time I've tried to be conscious of like where I'm learning about that stuff and who I'm learning from and in the beginning I wasn't learning from you know I wasn't actually learning from the source if that makes sense. I was learning from these other places

where I experienced it as a you know whatever as a you know white dude living in Connecticut or whatever you know what I mean like You're going to start from a place of ignorance when you're exploring a culture that isn't yours. But hopefully, part of your process is like leaning more into that and acknowledging and understanding the culture better. Because I think that's better for all of us achieving understanding amongst each other. Yeah. And there's so many, like, interesting parts of this. I will say, like, I did reach out to Courtney Cook for comment and I did hear back.

And her team said that Courtney really believes it's important to give credit, avoid presenting these dishes as her own creations, and to approach them with respect. Her team also acknowledged that food naturally moves between communities, particularly online, and that Courtney's intention is always to celebrate, amplify, and not take ownership of the cultures behind the food. So that's her response.

Here's what I think, and here's what I've sort of picked up from how people have responded. Like I think that Courtney Cook is likely coming from that place of you were talking about, right? Like she enjoys this food, she appreciates this food, she wants to share this food. And to a certain degree, like all of us, right, when we're trying recipes from other cultures, there is going to be like, well, I don't know how to do this, but I'm going to try it. And we all sort of adapt and cook recipes from other places all the time. But I think what makes this distinct and the issue at hand is who gets to benefit when something from another culture becomes popular?

You know, who gets the props for making something delicious? Who gets those potential cooking book deals or the followers, right? Like, that is kind of to me where the line gets a little blurry around like who is profiting and who gets to kind of reap the reward of a genuinely. wonderful, delicious dish from a community of people. There's another dish that Courtney Cook sort of came under fire for talking about. It's called Korean Army-Based Stew. She presented it as Army-based stew. Some creators felt like she was erasing the history of that dish because, you know,

it erased the Korean War history that was part of the creation of that Korean Army-based stew. And so now when she posts videos about that particular, particular dish. And I've seen in the comments of multiple of those videos, she has the same comment, you know, saying, my goal is appreciation, not ownership. This dish has a very difficult history. You should seek out Korean cooks for authentic recipes and read the history of this dish to better understand its origins and significance. So she's like putting that comment under tons of videos about that same dish. And this is a question that I think about when I was researching this episode, which is, I think part of the problem here is the algorithm.

Like, I think the algorithm is pushing videos that get lots of views. And I think the algorithm in general doesn't, it doesn't usually favor context. So, like, even if Courtney Cook maybe left a comment of attribution on one of her other videos, maybe you get a video where she didn't. It raises a lot of, it raises a lot of questions for me about how does the issue of credit work, on a platform where the algorithm is going to continue to push videos from big creators. Yeah, it's really, man, it's tough. It's one of those things. It's tough to tell, it's tough for me to tell if this is like an internet thing or a thing that's always existed that's just getting sort of amplified, right?

Yeah, I think it's both. Yeah, I think it's both, maybe. The creators that I feel like I've really come to follow closely, and I follow a lot of creators on. YouTube who make food. Like that is specifically how I use YouTube the most is like repairs and food. They're pretty good at being like either either I'm like following like souped up recipes who's like a Chinese woman who's making Chinese food, right? Or it's like somebody who's saying I went and studied this and have and now I'm showing

it to you as opposed to being like, I like these eggs. they're kind of tasty this way. I'm not sure what they're called. I think they're called this, but I'm not sure. And I like it this way. Like that's, to me, there's like a difference in a level of like research that you're doing before you're going into the world with the thing. Right. Which.

Like a level of responsibility. Yeah, which seems important for that kind of, you know, creation. Yeah. And I will say like what you were talking about with the, is this an internet issue or is this a. like societal issue. I think obviously, to me at least, they feel like intertwined because the question of like appropriation versus appreciation is age old. We're always thinking about it and we should always be interrogating that. And the same patterns that play out in society, I think, are going to play out online and the algorithm is just going to accelerate them. That's how I see it.

That sounds not excellent. Yeah, I was like, you thought we were just going to be talking about eggs? Sulk! It's an episode about tough cultural issues. Cultural appropriations. Always lurking around the corner. I just hope that people continue to learn about other parts of the world and that they're safe to do that. And also that they do it with respect and with an interest in learning. Stay curious, stay hungry.

I think that's the takeaway for this episode. Kalyani Saksana, thank you very much for going down. this egg rabbit hole with me. Thanks for letting me explore. Oh, no. That just came to me. Listeners, if you have a recipe that you love from another culture that you would like to send us, we would love to read it.

If you have a folk recipe that you discovered in the Pickling subreddit that you would like to send us, please do. and also like if you have like an egg pun that you want to toss our way that we didn't get to if you want to egg toss it our way you know what I'm saying oh come on don't be shy because you know I'll be reading those even if Kalyani's not reading them throwing them straight in the trash no I will be I will be I'll be groaning as I do it but I will be seated every day you can send those to you can send those to endless thread at wbwr.org.com you look forward to them. And one more thing before we go, endless Eggers. We need your help. More than three billion

people around the world use WhatsApp. So there's a good chance you're one of them. We want to hear from more of you about how you use it. Is it where you find your pickled eggs recipes, or have you stumbled into any sort of unexpected WhatsApp communities? How has WhatsApp changed your life off of your phone. And how has it changed the way that you talk to your friends and your family and other people? You can email us or even better send us a voice memo to Endless Thread at WBUR.org.

All right. That's all, Yokes. Endless Thread is a production of WBUR in Boston. This episode was produced by Grace Tatter. It was co-hosted by Coyani Saxena and Ben Brock Johnson. We also reported and brought the stories. It was edited by Meg Kramer and Dave Shaw. Mix and sound design by our production manager, Paul Vikes.

The rest of our team is Amory Sebertson, Dean Russell, Emily Jenkowski, and our senior managing producers, Summa to Joshi. Endless Thread is a podcast about the blurred lines between online communities and pickled versus brazed eggs. If you have an online mystery and untold history or another wild story from the internet, you know what to do again email us at endless thread at wb ur.org