Have you ever eaten Fertilized Duck Eggs (Hột Vịt Lộn / Balut)

The dish can be quite shocking to some foreigners. And we bet that many foreigners wouldn’t dare to try this dish. Howerver, this is a great, tasty, nutritious and cheap road-side snack that can be found anywhere in Vietnam.

Balut

The egg is not a normal egg. The normal egg is the egg that you take away right after the duck laid out the egg. But this egg is kept warm about 2 weeks and then after that we took the egg and boiled it over and we eat it. Some parts of the baby duck already established and maybe you can see a leg, a head or some kinds of organ of the baby duck inside the egg. No doubt this sounds repulsive to most readers, but it really is just a matter of getting used to it. If you can come over the idea and get the dare , the courage to try it, I think that you’d love it. Ultimately, the taste – not the idea – of a food should be what counts.

Fertilized Duck Eggs

Fetal duck eggs are sold in many restaurants and on the street from one of the vendors on the sidewalk. They’re easy to spot because you’ll see rows of large, porcelain-white duck eggs either stacked in a pyramid or displayed in large egg cartons.
Each egg costs between 5-10,000VNĐ (less than $0.50). For this you get an egg in a pretty egg-cup. Tap the top of the egg and make a small hole in the shell from which to drink the juice – sounds horrible, but it’s not. And there is an indispensable element of the dish, it is the condiment. This is a special mixture of a small saucer of salt, pepper and lime . This dish would be incomplete without a typical kind of herb to eat with, we called it “Rau Răm” ( Vietnamese coriander). These three elements look great together, and their flavours complement each other perfectly: the richness of the egg is tempered by the salty-sour of the muối tiêu chanh, and the Vietnamese coriander leaves are eaten after to cleanse the palate – a bit like the mints you receive at the end of a meal in some restaurants.

This diagram shows the essential components of a serving of fetal duck egg

If you’re an egg-lover the only obstacle you have to overcome is the idea of the fetus. If you can do that you’ll understand why millions of Vietnamese eat fetal duck eggs each day.