WeirdMeat.com, a travel and food blog. Documents experiences eating strange foods around the world. What is weird to one, is normal to another. I want to find out why. Includes articles, travel stories, photos.
Monday, September 22, 2008
White Ant Eggs
... some alley off Sukhumvit, Bangkok, Thailand
The Sukhumvit area of Bangkok is a paradise for the amateur adventure eater. From weird, unidentifiable bugs served by multi-gendered street vendors, to odd goat parts in strictly halal restaurants, and even a condom restaurant. We'd already eaten all the insects we could find, and after a few shots of various exotic liquors, we found a soup vendor with a large bucket of what looked like ... maggots. Gastronaut gold!
These were the fabled white ant eggs we'd been looking for, finally!
Collage of white ant eggs, larvae, and baby ants in our soup.
Most of them were plain white, about the size of puffed rice, but some of them had little black eye balls, and some of them were half egg / half embryo. And there were a few fully born ants in the mix as well.
The soup was awesome. Why can't the rest of the world do street food as good as Thailand? The little ant babies were soft and had a subtle peppery taste. Some of the plump ones popped in our mouth. These would be a fine addition to your morning Frosted Flakes -- ants are one of the most efficient ways to get protein.
When my friend Mark David Elliot, who writes a blog called LikeALocal.cn about Shanghai food, especially cheap eats and street food, called to suggest we do lunch on Shouning Road, my initial reaction was "uh, don't you know how much I hate Shanghai cuisine? Haven't I made myself clear?" [here. and here.]. But I'm also eager to be proven wrong, at least once, about Shanghai food. Mark has a lot of experience running around town checking out the real deal local food, so I agreed to meet him for lunch on Shouning Lu, which is known for small divey restaurants and street food vendors.
First we found a tiny place with a small display of oysters, clams, mussels, and scallops. These were already opened and left out on a tray sitting on the sidewalk in the sun (or lack there of, it's Shanghai after all). I found this disconcerting -- the raw meat was collecting dust and pollution and warm, dry air. Then a fellow stopped by on a bicycle and dumped a big bag of muddy mess right on the street in front of us, and hosed it off to reveal large oysters. I ordered one of these and had it placed, open face, right on top of hot coals. They covered it with a huge glop of raw minced garlic mixed with green herbs. This turned out to be reasonably toothsome, but it's not particularly Shanghainese food.
We then found a vendor who served us a deep-fried battered pork chop on top of two deep-fried rice cakes (actually like a 6-inch by 2-inch thick rice noodle). Topped with vinegar, this really reminded us of UK-style fish and chips, except for the absolutely nasty sweet brown gravy they added -- that's the Shanghai way -- I would ask them to hold it next time.
Then we spotted a few curbside woks ready for action. The vendors have a variety of noodles or rice, and a big selection of ingredients and sauces that you can order as you wish. We watched a few others order and knew what to do. I ordered a fried rice, and restrained the chef from adding anything sweet or syrupy, and held the powdered MSG to just a teaspoon. I also encouraged her to add extra chili spice. I could tell the chef was a little annoyed that I was micro-managing her cooking, but it was worth it. The fried rice was palatable, but unlike any I'd had in Shanghai, because I'd more or less put it together myself. The only thing I could not change is the quality of the ingredients, most importantly the cooking oil, which is, I believe, half of what's wrong with Shanghai food.
We also found a man dumping dry corn meal into a machine that pooped out a stream of puffed corn, with a little knife that spun around rapidly to cut the puff stream into little bite-sized nuggets. Tasted like parcel packing foam.
We'd given up on finding anything particularly "weird" on the street when we turned a corner and found a shop specializing in odd duck parts. We ordered a couple whole duck heads. They're just full, cooked, and lightly seasoned heads of duck, which are partially split in the center, so you can crack them open and dig out the inner bits like the brains and cartilage, and uh, whatever else exists inside a duck's head. We didn't get much to munch on inside, but the thin skin covering the head and bill was tasty, even if it required a lot of little nibbling and tearing with our front teeth. There were also duck tongues and webbed feet and other duck parts, but we've had most of the other stuff before. The duck heads, meh, the skin was tasty but a lot of work for very little to chew on. Still, we appreciate that these parts are not going to waste. Here's a few photos of us eating duck heads:
I've done the edible egg embryo before in other countries, but I've always wanted to try it in the Philippines. I first heard of this popular snack from perhaps a National Geographic article on the Philippines, and for years I wondered if I could stomach them. I have several times now.
They're duck embryos, but there was a rumor going around today in Cebu that a vendor had been spotted selling "chicken balut", which my acquaintences agreed was a silly idea and just didn't taste as good as the duck ones. I can't be sure; we didn't see him tonight.
As I said before, when I ate them in Cambodia, I actually quite liked them and it's probably my favorite tasting weird meat. I haven't tried them side-by-side, of course, but the Philippine balut resembled the Cambodian ones in every respect I can recall.
First you choose between 12 day, 16 day, and 18 day. The 12 day ones are just hard-boiled eggs with no embryonic development. The 16 day ones are further along but concensus was that these are just inferior to the king of balut -- exactly 18 days after being laid.
After you choose what kind you want, the vendor grabs them piping hot from the basket and passes you a little stool, salt, and a vinegar-onion sauce. You hold the hot egg and flick carefully but forcefully at the top of it with your middle finger. It cracks a bit and you gently remove a small hole from the top, so you can sip the savory broth before removing the whole shell. I agree that the 18-day one is better than the younger ones. You might come across some small chunkies but it's usually just eaten all the way through, in about 3 mouthful bites. You can see feathers, head, wings, and skeleton forming, but it's basically an extra-chewy easter egg. The flavor is savory and delicious; the texture satisfying. Match with a light pilsner beer.
If you're in Cebu City looking for the balut, I got mine from a street vendor at Fuente Osmena circle. He was really helpful and knowledgable, and proud of his product. The cool thing about traveling in the Philippines is that most everyone speaks English, so don't be shy to ask questions. ---- Addition: Found more info on balut. The eggs are from the "itik duck" which is native to the Philippines. Itik mother ducks are lazy so humans have to incubate them after the mother ignores them. That explains a lot. More info here.
I love Bangkok. Where else can you find a transvestite selling deep-fried scorpions and giant cockroaches for tourist consumption? Consumption as in food, for people.
Khao San Road is famous as the world's backpacker mecca. Hardcore travelers lament that Khao San Road is now a big sell-out, long past its good old days of flea-bag hotels, drugs, and legends. So yeah it is, but you can still find everything you used to, and more. It's probably the most international block in the world. Travelers unload souvenirs and trade stories collected from all corners of the world. You can buy Dutch disco CDs, African drums, Guatemalan hats, and Chinese opium pipes.
You can also buy a selection of snacks from a bug cart. Crickets of various sizes, large black scorpions, meal worms, and large water bugs. But the timing never seemed right. The carts seem to appear at odd hours, so after a few days of disappointment, I'd given up on eating the bugs.
I certainly saw a few critters at our hotel. We had a few in-room geckos that were feasting on little bugs but they refused to share with us.
Then I saw her. As we were carving into a blackened catfish on a sidewalk table, an old lady rolled by with a cart of fried bugs. I got up a few minutes later to seek her out but she had vanished into the night. I was sad for 2 days and had given up all hope. Then, last night, as we were finishing up our final Pad Thai before going to bed, another cart rolled up: BUGS! The vendor, a flamboyant transvestite, was excited to help me choose the bug course. It was oddly reminiscent of ordering from a cheese cart at a fancy restaurant. Anyway, I got a small scoop of each bug, 8 of them all together. All the bugs were deep fried and sprinkled with a pepper. We ordered a few of each and sat down on the curb to analyze the taste and texture of each. Here's a photo, set next to a Singha Beer can for size demonstration.
Here's a list:
Black scorpion. Poked my lip with the stinger on accident but ate the rest of the tail in two bites. Flavorless.
Big grasshopper. Tasted grassy like some Savignon Blanc's do. Not bad.
Malengdaa water bug. Looks like a giant cockroach. This is the bug they grind into chili paste in Thailand. We picked up a small bottle of it at 7-11. Bug jam at 7-11. Anyway, the one I had wasn't very exciting. But the most difficult to place in my mouth, to be honest.
2 kinds of maggots. These were my favorites. One tasted like almonds, the other was juicy and sweet.
Crickets. Crunchy, tasted like potato chips. I could chow down on these next baseball game.
The rest were small, undefinable, maybe other kinds of crickets, or merely legs and antennii.
I thought I'd have to go to the Philippines for this one. It's actually been on the top of my "must eat it!" list for years. But lucky me! I found it last night, right around the corner from the Foreign Correspondents building in Phnom Penh. A nice lady with a cart had them.
Here's the deal: They take duck eggs in which the embryo has begun to form in to a real live chick, and hard boil them. Good with salt, pepper and lime. I bought two, one for my father, who insisted he was full from the salad he had for dinner (wimp!). Anyway, I got the whole thing on video.
You peel the egg shell off and inside is a duck egg (about 2-3 times as big as a normal chicken egg) and the egg is surrounded by blood vessels, and you can see the early form of a duck baby within the white of the egg. The yolk is still separate. The first bite had a crunchy surprise in the middle, which clearly resembled a beek and duck head. You can see the formation of feathers throughout the egg. Anyway, the whole treat had a pleasant savory flavor and denser texture than conventional hard-boiled eggs. I'm going to pick up a couple more for our road trip south today.
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OK, I've tried a few more now and found that they're available at different stages of embryonic development. You can get them younger (more like an egg), older (almost hatched), or anywhere in between. All are delicious. Although this one sounds probably the most "weird" of all weird meats, it's one of the most tasty. This is a popular snack food, with locals eating it while watching TV sports, picnicking, or as an appetizer to a full meal.
In the Philipines they call them balut eggs. Actually, I'll soon travel to Nanjing, China, where chicken abortions are a local specialty.
