Finally Ate Balut (F.A.B.)
It was amazing. One of the Asian grocery stores in my beloved White Center sells balut!! For those not in the know, balut is a Filipino delicacy consisting of a boiled duck egg with a real baby duck inside. I have wanted to try this ever since I first heard about it from my wife’s family almost ten years ago. At first I pictured it like the Cardassian Taspar egg from the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Chain of Command, Part II”.
The chicks in those eggs were fully formed and moving. You ate them alive! That’s what I pictured when I first heard of balut.
Well, real balut is not that extreme. The chick is still developing, and it’s cooked. Here is what mine looked like after boiling it for 25 minutes:
I apologize for the poor picture quality. The yellow part is the yolk, and the brown part is the baby duck. In the first picture, the light spot on the bottom left might be the eye. I was more concerned with getting myself to eat it than with examining its anatomy. That will come later.
Well, I might as well tell you how it tasted. OMG IT WAS DELICIOUS!! It didn’t feel like I was eating a whole duck. No bones or feathers. There was one part which felt kind of fibrous, which I’m guessing was the beak. It was only a very tiny part and didn’t really take away from the flavor. I’m not really sure, though, if balut would taste much difference than a regular old hard boiled duck egg, since the predominant flavor is the yolk, which is WAY WAY WAY better than in a hard boiled chicken egg. I can’t even eat those things.
End Conclusion: Balut = delicious. Anyone should know that.
Stumble it!
March 7th, 2008 at 11:33 am
When I was a kid, I used to eat Balut like it’s chocolate. I agree, it’s delicious…
March 12th, 2008 at 7:34 am
[…] I decided to cook the last two of the balut, but I accidentally dropped one egg too hard into the pan, and a piece of shell broke off. I […]