✓ Eat Balut!

For those who know me or who have seen my bucket list, they know that I love trying new and unusual food. Among others, these are some of the mantras that I seek to follow all the time:

• If at a restaurant, look for something you’ve never tried before and order that.
• If in a foreign country, try their national dish(es) and any other unique food you come across.

Those people will also know that I have a separate food section for “strange food”, which includes bugs, unique fruits and plenty of other things – that at least are strange to me personally.

And, long before I did any blogging or made some fun videos with my girlfriend, I had tried balut in the Philippines. Balut what?

Balut is a fertilized developing egg embryo (usually duck) that is boiled and eaten from the shell. It tastes largely like an egg – but it looks pretty morbid and disgusting. It is commonly sold as street food in South China and Southeast Asian countries, notably the Philippines, Cambodia and Vietnam. And the length of incubation before the egg is cooked is a matter of local preference, but generally ranges between 14 and 21 days.

However, so yes, I had tried it before – but I realized that Polly had never. And luckily there’s a great Filipino community in Hong Kong, so finding balut didn’t prove to be very hard. Naturally though, instead of telling Polly that we were to eat a balut egg, I surprised her by pretending it was a normal egg. As you see in the video, she got quite surprised…