In today's episode, I show you this strange thing we call a "century egg", "hundred year egg" or "thousand year egg". Don't worry, it isn't actually 1000 years old, but the flavour may make you reminisce of the "good old days." Back when we had no electricity, refrigerators and all that.
In Chinese, this is called “皮蛋”, a type of preserved egg. It is made by soaking uncooked eggs in some kind of solution of calcium hydroxide, table salt and calcium carbonate. The process makes an egg that looks like this:
I have lived in China for over 3 years and never decided to taste these things until now!
The smell is really earthy. It smells like a building material. When I cut it up into pieces and put it into a small bowl, it looked like this:
The taste is really earthy. It tastes like I'm eating a putrid egg mixed with stones. The stone taste just doesn't sit well with me. In my opinion, it's quite bad. Surprisingly, many Chinese people do like to eat this egg. They usually mix it with rice or some kind of porridge. Eating it on its own might be too strong for them as well. I guess it is like Vegemite of mayonnaise: good in small doses with something, awful when eaten alone.
Check out this video to see my reaction to this century egg challenge!
