The century egg, revisited

"Wimps". That's what a friend called us for not trying the century egg, which he claimed was actually quite good. We couldn't let that stand, so we took advantage of our three day stopover in Kuala Lumpur to dig into a century egg.

Thanks to a strong Chinese influence in Malaysia, century eggs are easy to find. We picked up a four pack at the local grocery store, which had a selection of duck, chicken or quail eggs. We chose chicken.

Century eggs are eggs that have been preserved in a mixture of clay, ash, salt, quicklime, and rice hulls for several weeks or months. This process turns the whites of the egg a lovely brown while the yolks become greenish. The egg smells a bit like ammonia.

After peeling and rinsing the egg, all that was left was to give it a try...

The texture of the egg wasn't great - the whites are (after weeks of "aging") firm and gelatinous, requiring you to chew while simultaneously threatening to slip down your throat without warning. The taste, though, wasn't too bad for Erin. In fact there wasn't much of a taste at all, so long as you didn't take a big whiff of the egg while eating it. Brook thought it was akin to munching on, well, a pickled rotten egg...

In the end, we think the century egg is best as an novel accompaniment. Perhaps sliced with a salad or chopped up in a sandwich. We probably won't be buying more century eggs for our flight to Nepal, but we're glad we're not wimps anymore...