Chicken Feet & Thousand-Year-Old Egg

Young Coconut, ready to drink

After two months, it's safe to say one of my favorite parts of travel has got to be the food.  New flavors, textures, combinations...  our cooking repertoire will be vastly enhanced by the time we get home!  If we hear that a city or region is known for a particular dish, we do our best to find it.  Such things rarely disappoint; the chili crab in Singapore being a good example.  Our guide book alerted me to a Javanese specialty called "Gudeg" that originally came from Yogyakarta.  The day after we explored Borobudur, Mendut & Prambanan temples, it was time to find this dish of rice, jackfruit, egg and chicken.  While Aron opted for a standard plate of wontons, I gamely ordered the Gudeg.

Gudeg, a specialty from Yogyakarta, Java, Indonesia 

When the plate was set in front of me, I was more than a little unnerved!  Resting against a bed of white rice was a chicken foot surrounded by two types of chutney or stew.  And there was an odd, russet-colored egg; hard-boiled, peeled and cut in half.  But I wasn't ready to give up on Gudeg without an honest try.  A tentative bite of the egg revealed a smoky flavor that paired well with the stews.  The first mixture was a jackfruit & coconut milk sweet stew and the other was more meat-based, with shreds of beef.  I wasn't too sure exactly how to eat the sticky, honey-glazed chicken foot.  However, it's tiny slivers of meat were very flavorful, though somewhat hard to find.  (Next time I see chicken feet on the Dim Sum trolley, I won't turn up my nose!)  A puffed rice cracker and dollop of hot sambal rounded out the meal.  I'm glad I persevered with Gudeg, because despite it's unappetizing color, this dish grew on me.  When I later looked up recipes, I learned that the jackfruit, teak leaves, galangal & coriander lend a pinkish-brown hue to the egg and the stews.

Eating outside my comfort zone is kind of addictive, and I was on a roll.  The next day, I couldn't resist ordering "Bubur with a Thousand-Year-Old Egg" just because of it's name.  Bubur looked like a rice porridge, and as for the egg, well... I decided to take my chances.   Aron looked at me, eyebrows raised, and laughingly asked if I knew what I was ordering.  He vaguely remembered the egg featuring on an extreme food tv program.

But I knew I loved congee from when we tried it at Nathan's Congee in Hong Kong, a small, clamorous  cafeteria where the server had impatiently waved us into the only open booth.  It's a savory rice porridge boiled for a couple of hours with up to 8 parts water to 1 part rice.  The options for add-ins are as endless as one's imagination:  ginger, meat, kimchi, soy sauce.  Today's bubur/congee was on it's way with shiitake mushrooms, chicken, shrimp, green onions and thousand-year-old egg.

This was one of the most strange yet delicious meals I have ever eaten.  The bubur was much thicker than I had expected, and had a hearty, rich chicken flavor.  Chinese crullers, known in Indonesia as "cakwe", were served on the side for dipping into the bubur.  Chicken pieces & shrimp were scattered over the top, along with coins of green onions.  The shiitake mushrooms and egg slices were carefully placed in a wheel pattern.  After trying the thousand-year-old egg, I rationed the four pieces, not greedily eating them all at once; they were that good (and yes, I did share...)

Bubur with Thousand-Year-Old Egg

The yolk, smooth and creamy, is a charcoal grey with a hint of green.  It has a pungent, earthy taste; almost cheese-like.  In contrast, the flavorless egg "white" has a gelatinous texture and looks like clear coffee jelly.  One would expect something that is preserved to be extremely salty, but, happily, this is not the case.

close up to see the interesting colors of the Century Egg

I had to do research on this egg, also known as Century Egg, or "pidan".  A Chinese treat, these eggs are actually only a few months old, traditionally made by burying chicken or duck's eggs in clay.  Nowadays, they are preserved in a mixture of salt, tea, lime and wood ash.  The history of this delicacy dates back to the Ming Dynasty.  Duck eggs were found in a shallow pool of slaked lime that had been used as mortar two months before in the construction of a home.  After tasting them, the homeowner added salt to the recipe and produced another batch, and here we are, 600 years later!