Bizarre Food【1】: Century Egg

Chinese Bizarre Food - Century Egg

This is a common food in my daily life. I often eat it with porridge and tofu. Once, my roommate, an Australia girl, found it was unbelievable that I was eating a "black egg". Then, I found that this is a bizarre food for some people who have never seen it. Century Egg is also known as a “thousand year” or “preserved egg”, century Egg is a traditional Chinese delicacy, which is very popular. Unlike the name suggests, the duck, quail or chicken egg in question is not really a thousand years old. The eggs are actually preserved in an alkaline mixture of lime, tea, salt and wood ash for several weeks or months. The preparation method makes the shell look aged and the egg-white shiny amber. The gray yolk develops rich, pungent flavor compounds, often reminiscent of strong cheese or even ammonia. Myriad condiments, sesame oil and soy sauce help to round out the powerful, distinctive taste of the eggs.

How to make it?

The traditional method for producing century eggs is a development and improvement from the aforementioned primitive process. Instead of using just clay, a mixture of wood ash, quicklime, and salt is included in the plastering mixture, thereby increasing its pH and sodium content. This addition of natural alkaline compounds improved the odds of creating century eggs instead of spoilage and also increased the speed of the process. A recipe for creating century eggs through this process starts with the infusion of three pounds of tea in boiling water. To the tea, three pounds of quicklime (or seven pounds when the operation is performed in winter), nine pounds of sea salt, and seven pounds of wood ash from burned oak is mixed into a smooth paste. While wearing gloves to prevent the lime corroding the skin, each egg is individually covered by hand, then rolled in a mass of rice chaff to keep the eggs from adhering to one another before they are placed in cloth-covered jars or tightly woven baskets. The mud slowly dries and hardens into a crust over several months, and then the eggs are ready for consumption.

How to cook it?
Century eggs can be eaten without further preparation, on their own or as a side dish. The Cantonese wrap chunks of this egg with slices of pickled ginger root (sometimes sold on a stick as street food). A Shanghainese recipe mixes chopped century eggs with chilled tofu. In Taiwan, it is popular to eat century eggs on top of cold tofu with katsuobushi, soy sauce, and sesame oil in a style similar to Japanese hiyayakko. A variation of this recipe common in northern China is to slice century eggs over chilled silken (soft) tofu, adding liberal quantities of shredded young ginger and chopped spring onions as a topping, and then drizzling light soy sauce and sesame oil over the dish, to taste. They are also used in a dish called old-and-fresh eggs, where chopped century eggs are combined with (or used to top) an omelet made with fresh eggs. Some Chinese households cut them up into small chunks and cook them with rice porridge to create "century egg and lean pork congee". This is sometimes served in dim sum restaurants.

• cold and dressed with sauce

• Century eggs with tofu

• century egg and lean pork congee

  -Kexin Yu
Feb.1,2012