I love balut! I enjoy sucking on its hot broth,
relishing on the yolk and the duck embryo, and the ceremony of
dissecting it very much like the solemn ritual of the Tea Ceremony.
Balut is a Filipino street food. It is a boiled duck egg which is
conventionally eaten from the shell with a dash of salt as condiment. However, not all duck eggs can be made as balut.
Ideally, duck eggs are aged for 17 days when the selection process. By
this time, the chick inside has yet to develop its beak, feathers,
claws, and still has underdeveloped bones---the perfect balut!
Much that I enjoy slurping on the balut's embryonic soup, the breaded
fried balut version is what I usually trip on nowadays. So yesterday on
my way home I chanced upon an Eggspert kiosk at SM Fairview and saw that
they were selling fried balut. Like Pavlov's dog---I was salivating in
the anticipation of getting my first bite!
By the time my order was heated and garnished with vinegar I was already
in a frenzy and as soon as I sat down I immediately devoured one whole
egg in a single bite! It was then that I noticed that I was munching on a lot of bones---big ones at that!
So after I've swallowed the last morsel of the first egg I decided to
dissect the second one to get a look see. I wish I hadn't because what I
saw almost turned my stomach! The chick was already fully formed with beak, feathers, and claws!
I lost my appetite after that. Well, the Vietnamese prefer their
version of the balut this way but I'm no Vietnamese so this didn't sit
well with me!
Well, I'm definitely not going to buy fried balut in Eggspert!
