More Cock and Balls

We'd already eaten rooster testicles in Taiwan last year, but we encountered them again on a recent trip to Hangzhou. After a night out corrupting the youth with danger music and too much drinking, we hit a hot pot place with some local friends.



This always seems like a good idea. Fill the belly with food after drinking too much. But then, what to drink with the food? More beer!



We ordered a bunch of stuff -- vegetables, starches, meats, and cooked them in the large pot of boiling oily water. The table next to us ordered a plate of something weird I'd seen before -- chicken testicles -- so I had to challenge my friends and see if they were still drunk enough to agree it was a good idea to eat cock balls at 4am.



We ordered them and cooked them just right, so they were full of juicy goodness and not overdone. I prefer testicles medium-rare.



Read more about eating chicken sexual organs here.
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Nanjing Chicken Embryo, Duck Blood, Bull Penis

Nanjing chicken embryo, duck blood, bull penis ... well isn't that a mouthful? Yes, and a delicious one. Last weekend I took the train to Nanjing, just a few hours up river from WeirdMeat's Shanghai headquarters. My good friend Coco introduced me to her good friend Nono, and thanks to Coco, because Nono turned out to be the perfect guide to Nanjing.

Nono took us to Nanjing Da Pai Dang, a very nice, but not too expensive, Nanjing specialty restaurant on the Hunan pedestrian street. It was a food explorer's dream. Literally hundreds of small dishes to choose from, each with real samples to look at instead of having to read the menu. Clean and modern, but classically decorated. We were greeted by kind elderly men in traditional dress, and seated by shy giggling waitresses who went to great lengths to ask me if I needed a fork. They could not believe I, a foreigner, could possibly handle two sticks to eat my food with. I amazed and charmed with my unorthodox but capable chopstick skills.

So here's what we ate! I'd heard about a Nanjing specialty that is similar to the Philippine balut, and the Cambodian duck embryo, but the difference in Nanjing is that they're chicken egg embryos, not ducks.



Nono carefully explained there are two types in Nanjing -- the dead ones, and the live ones. That didn't make a whole lot of sense to me, and I doubt the Supreme Court could handle it either, so I demanded a better translation. The "dead" ones are called "wang ji dan" and apparently they are D.O.A. before they're cooked. The "live" ones are called "huo zhu zi" and they're younger and fresher. The wang jidan are perhaps seasonal, and more difficult to hunt down, so we only got to try the huo zhuzi. They're chicken eggs so they're smaller than the duck embryos I'd had in other countries, and their flavor is more subtle. They are delicious, but not as thrilling as the SouthEast Asian ones. But you use the same salt-pepper-spice mix to flavor them. I had 3 of these. They each had tiny little chicken heads, less than an week old, so no feathers. I'd say about 12% chicken, 88% egg. BTW, what is that hard circle part on the bottom -- future bones? I'm told that Nanjing girls are crazy for them. If Nanjing girls are crazy for weird meat, that's cool with me.



After that we tried the duck blood soup (ya shui tang). This looks and tastes like dark purple-brown jello firm tofu, in a spicy broth. I'd seen something similar in Guangdong (Canton), but I was told that was pig blood. Nono confirmed this, and called Guangdong "the fountainhead of weird meat". Yes, indeed. The duck blood was also very good, full of bloody flavor and soaking up the spicy broth.

We ate all kinds of other good local dishes, and drank the local beer, which of course, was much much better than anything brewed in Shanghai. Before we left, I took another look at the offerings, and found "black bone chicken soup with bull penis (wu ji niu bian tang)." Had to try that one! The black meat silky chicken is a popular health tonic around China, which I've had many times. And in the bowl was a small cut of a bull's penis. It was a soft rubbery little thing that looked like calamari, with little half slices cut into it to make it more pliable and soak up flavor. I believe this was a small, circular cut of the bull's penis.



This penis was soft and tender like a fresh noodle, and captured the flavor of the soup nicely. Speaking of male cows, one of the waiters came up and told me I looked like ... the coach for the Chicago Bulls NBA team. OK. That's a new one.



On my second return, I tried a "quail on a stick". It's a whole quail. On a skewer. I'd had some quail at a French restaurant in Shanghai last week, and I'm finding that quail is my new favorite bird. Dark, gamey meat that goes well with red wine. Anyone know what kind of wine goes well with penis?

Chicken A$$

Manila, Philippines.

I dropped down to the Philippines for a quick vacation from China, hung out at the Cebu Shangri-La on Mactan Island for a few days. The food there was great but not many odd items to explore. They didn't offer much Filipino food there. Nice cocktails though. I didn't get to see much of Manila, and Cebu City's Carbon Market (a real deal third world wet market) was interesting to poke around but man I was not impressed with the food I saw there. There were few vegetables, and I didn't find any of the Philipine desserts I'd been searching for.

My first night in Manila, I wandered the streets looking for the weirdest meats. I had high hopes and expectations, but I had landed in the Malate district, with no connections, and found the place to be, well, lacking in Filipino food. I checked the stores and found little to interest me, except a little bottle of durian jam. Instead I found lots of fast food chains, many of them probably-failed-by-now in the home country ... like Shakey's Pizza. Remember them? Well they have them in the Philippines now.

I ended up eating at a yuppie cafe because I was exhausted and hungry and the food looked good and they were playing Detroit techno music and I'm a sucker for that as much as I'm a sucker for weird meat. After I filled up there, I finally found a row of skewer shacks. One of them had English signs for everything and in addition to the normal universal standards, they had one intriguing weird meat dish: "Chicken Ass". So I found room in my belly to fit one skewer of the chicken booty meat. It tastes like chicken. I know that's a trite cliche, but really the taste and texture were just like every other chicken meat I've had. In fact, you've probably eaten chicken fanny already. McNuggets? Probably some chicken patooty in those!



They probably had a laugh to see some foreigner walk in and eyes light up for the chicken butt, and nothing else. Chicken ass on a skewer.

Later I found an upscale Philipino restaurant that serves field crickets, fried froggies, balut embryo eggs, and "chicken tail" (polished terminology for the upscale crowd, eh?), but dining there just wouldn't fit into my schedule, so that's on the list for my next trip here. I'm already looking forward to it. The Philippines are a good travel alternative to Thailand -- less tourist hoards, amazing beaches, everyone speaks English. I'm coming back soon!