Salted Duck Eggs

Hi everyone,

I know I promised you a post, but life has recently gotten in the way of that.

I was let go from my job two weeks ago, and my previously busy life has turned upside-down. You’d think that I would be eager to take my sudden glut of free time and start really devoting time to the project, but so far that has not been the case.

What they don’t tell you when you suddenly have a ton of free time are all the things you totally forgot about doing when you’re working all hours – things like cleaning the apartment and going to the gym and having your first summer in years where you actually go out in the sunshine.

Don’t forget the obligatory ‘I’m depressed I don’t have a job period.’ Which I think I’m over now.

Anyway, enough about me and my sorry unemployed ass – I think ‘m ready to come back to this project and really devote some time to it. I mean, its not like I have anything better to do at the moment.

 

I promised (like, two months ago, now) that the next thing I tackle would be something people actually want to eat. But it wouldn’t be EWPP without a strange ingredient, so first I present…

SALTED DUCK EGGS.

This is not what you think, or at least what initially came to mind for me: a hardboiled duck egg with salt on it. Not so much. Turns out that Salted Duck Eggs are eggs preserved by soaking duck eggs in brine, or packing them in salted charcoal.

This process causes the egg to have a sharp-tasting, liquid white, and a dark orange, firm, fatty yolk.

The yolk is what I’m after, in this case – it’s apparently that salty ‘something’ one finds in the custard filling of HK-style buns, and a whole yolk is often baked into mooncakes.

Many people are fascinated by eggs, and rightly so – its amazing to me that something like a soak in brine would cause such a dramatic change to the yolk and white. Although I didn’t pick up any 1000-year-old eggs, I hear that they are even more so: a white that has become completely solid and clear. Crazy.

I’ve never worked with Salted duck eggs before, but I am reading that they are often boiled and used as a supplement to congee (a chinese porridge).

It looks like the way to prepare the yolks for use are to oil a baking sheet and bake the yolks at 350 degrees, for eight minutes.

I’m having a lot of fun with the raw yolk, though: its solid and pliant, like play dough, which allows all sorts of fun things, like rolling it so thin it lets light pass.

 

Turns out that baking them (as people usually seem to do) makes it lose that beautiful color and translucent quality. If I had sousvide stuff, I would try that method. Maybe steaming would work as well.

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Tagged as: experiment, ingredient, neat-o, salted duck eggs