PARTIALLY FORMED CHICKEN FETUSES TASTE BETTER THAN I THOUGHT THEY WOULD

Not long ago at our office Halloween pot luck lunch party one of our web design guys (Edwin) brought half a dozen balut eggs to the festivities. For those unfamiliar with balut, it's an Asian delicacy described thusly on Wikipedia: "balut is a fertilized duck (or chicken) egg with a nearly-developed embryo inside that is boiled alive and eaten in the shell." In other words, it's not something most people in the Western hemisphere would eat on a regular basis.

Edwin is from the Philippines and also eats in all of our office eating contests. We had been talking about digging into some balut eggs for a while and, as soon as I saw them all nestled in paper towels in that Tupperware container next to the sloppy joes I knew it wouldn't be long until Beau, Edwin and I were eating them. I just hoped that they weren't the "almost fully fertilized" embryos with the beaks and soft bones. Thankfully, these weren't.

According to Wikipedia, the type of balut we ate is 17 days old (preferred in the Philippines), whereas the Vietnamese prefer their balut 19 to 21 days old (with beak, feathers and claws).

Here's how the balut chow down went down. First of all, balut is always stored and served warm (or at room temperature). We cracked off the top and tilted it back to slurp the reddish broth that surrounds the fetus. It's not much liquid but it tastes salty and pretty much like egg juice would -- if eggs could be juiced. Then comes the fun part. With a fork, we scooped out a yellowish veiny mass followed by a white glob of something. Overall, the taste was sort of like an egg yolk, only slighty metallic and a little bit like blood. At the bottom of the egg was a hard, white mass which Edwin told us we weren't supposed to eat. We didn't argue with him.

I have to admit, I was a lot more skittish about my balut eating experience than Beau and Edwin were. We're already trying to figure out how to incorporate balut into an upcoming inter-office eating contest involving several disgusting foods. Oh boy. I can't wait.