The egg is surprisingly creamy, velvety and succulent. When eaten with the slices of the pink ginger, the sweet and spicy flavour adds another element to the dish that refreshes the palate between bites. Century eggs are eaten throughout the day — with breakfast, for dinner or as a snack or appetiser — and oenophiles are adamant that they pair beautifully with full-bodied Bordeaux wine or bubbly champagne.
The eggs are also baked into pastries. Opened in as a dim sum restaurant, Hang Hueng has garnered a following for their version of the eggs, wrapped in a golden-brown crust. The relatively simple recipe — using a century egg, pickled ginger, puff pastry dough and bean paste — has been the same for as long as Hang Hueng has been in business, with each sifu , a skilled tutor or worker, passing down the techniques from generation to generation. The result is a crispy and buttery pastry shell with a soft, flavourful egg inside.
The humble snacks are ubiquitous — from dim sum restaurants to pastry shops — and chefs throughout Hong Kong are still preserving this nostalgic bite of culinary heritage. These golden cakes have a surprising creamy centre Credit: Kate Springer. The year-old snack.
Share using Email. After about a month from the when the eggs were first put into the brine solution it's time to open them up. Carefully remove the clay encasement and the plastic wrap, then tap the egg to break the shell and gently peel away.
The eggs should be completely transformed! The whites of the eggs will now be a jelly-like translucent amber colour and the yolks a very dark green and with a texture much like a hard boiled egg. Take a look at picture 2 in this step to see the different consistency between the yolk and white in my egg-xperiment. Century eggs are typically served mashed up in soupy rice. I made a steamy bowl and served it to my friends. The taste was The appearance is deceiving and almost put me off eating it altogether, but once I ate some it wasn't that bad.
I'm happy I tried this and think I would probably eat it again. You know, sometime later much, much later. Question 7 months ago. Tip 11 months ago. This is two weeks after brine I cracked a single on it's own and their too soft at this stage, with the yolk not even set and only a thick cream in the core. I suggest doubling the time for curing after brine to a month or better at least! Will come back next month with either a tested egg or a complete egg depending how it turns out.
Thanks for sharing this! I read that the NaoH should be stored in plastic not glass though - is that true? Reply 1 year ago. I'm testing mine out in just a glass jar, so in ten days I'll let you know if it went well!
I know you can get the right grade containers for it online if your running it on the safe side. Reply 2 years ago. Plastic is best. Storing sodium hydroxide in glass can cause a reaction and frost the glass. For the length of time the eggs are in there I don't see this as an issue, but the right protocol is to use plastic. Or you could just go down to your local Chinatown or Asian food market and buy them off-the-shelf and ready-to-eat.
They might also be served in Chinese restaurants with the rice-broth more commonly known as "congee". I wish lol, in my area the nearest asian market is in a different state and don't have them, but when j could get them I loved them! Question 1 year ago. Hello sir, can you help me.
My eggs yolk is not totally transformed. What do you think is the problem? Answer 1 year ago. Why are my whites green two weeks in and not translucent brown? I coated my chicken eggs with beeswax btw. I didn't seal them in a plastic bag afterwards.
They are sitting in the pantry in egg cartons. I think they taste like they're supposed to but unless I compare them to store-bought ones I won't know for sure. If it's a cracked egg that got air into it or the solution then it's probably gone bad, I recommend opening one of the others to check! I've never seen one go green before so that's worrying.
The egg yolk and albumen can be seen in the cracked eggshell, with a clear change in yolk colour to green. Three of the five duck eggs opened on day 7 had yolks with a dark green colour, as shown in Fig. The yolks of these three eggs have also gelatinized more than the eggs opened on day 6 see Fig. The one that did not produce this flavour was an egg that had rotted see Fig.
The rotten duck eggshell had a crack in it which could have been the reason for it rotting. Figure 9. The egg yolk and albumen can be seen contained in the cracked eggshell, with changes in colour for both egg yolk and albumen seen.
Only the first egg opened had further progress in turning into a century egg. The yolk of this egg already looked very similar to that of a complete century egg, and the albumen had turned golden and gelatinized, as seen in Fig. The other four duck eggs opened still had yellow yolk with a pale yellow, the gel-like outer layer covering it see Fig. Figure The cracked eggshell contains the visible egg yolk and albumen with unexpected observations of no change from a normal duck egg.
Not one of the yolks was dark green, as would have expected. All five duck eggs had a paler yellow, gel-like outer layer covering the yolk, as seen in Fig. The albumen was not golden or gelatinized. The five duck eggs did not produce a unique smell. The eggs would have been expected to have almost turned into a complete century egg. The cracked eggshell contains the visible egg yolk and albumen, again with an unexpected observation of no alteration in colour.
This shows no progression in the formation of the century egg. The green colour and slight gelatinisation can be seen, which shows that the century egg formation is taking place but is not yet complete.
The eggs had similar observations to that of day 9. The last 10 duck eggs and all 14 chicken eggs were opened. All the duck eggs had no dark green colour, as would have expected Fig. The albumen did not gelatinize. As for the chicken eggs, all had a dark green and gel-like outer layer covering the yolk, this can be seen in Fig.
The observed changes within these eggs were similar to some of the duck eggs opened on day 7 and 8. On day 10, a total of 20 duck eggs and 15 chicken eggs were opened. One egg from both the duck and chicken batches remained unopened and were sent to Jilin University laboratory along with an original duck egg and a century egg bought on the market. These four eggs were analysed for their compositions, as shown in Table 2.
As the original report was in Chinese, it has been translated to English. For the original report see Fig. From the composition report, it is clear that the water content was the highest in normal duck eggs and the lowest in the century egg produced by traditional method.
The century egg bought from the market had only a 1. However, the century duck egg produced by the traditional method had a difference of In terms of energy, the chicken century egg produced by the traditional method had the lowest while the century egg bought on the market had the highest.
The duck century egg produced by the traditional method had a similarly high energy composition to the market bought century egg. For the protein composition, the chicken century egg produced by the traditional method had the highest protein content while the century egg bought from the market had the lowest protein content.
The duck century egg produced by the traditional method had a 0. Since the production of century eggs was thought to be by accidental discovery rather than developed specifically, this meant that the method was likely to be passed down by word of mouth and therefore slightly altered over the generations.
Although there is not an ideal nutritional composition for century eggs, the idea of having nutritional benefits that will contribute to our daily nutritional intake is important, but not specifically ideal to century eggs alone. Other ideal century egg formation processes may not be in terms of their nutritional composition but rather reducing cost and time, for example, having the most efficient amount of ingredients and reducing the time it takes to form these century eggs.
The major difference between the traditional and industrial method was the time factor. The industrial method was completed over a duration of 45 days to allow the eggs to be left in an inaccessible place. Whereas, the traditional method was completed over a suggested duration of 10 days and is likely the reason for the large difference in stage of century egg formation observed [9].
However, only those eggs in the last 2 days showed unexpectedly slow progression towards completion, so this may be due to problems that only posed to the eggs and conditions in these two batches. One possible explanation could be that these containers were not fully airtight, but to conclusively show this would require further investigation. Additionally, the ingredients used were slightly different between the two methods, which was expected because traditional methods use more old fashioned techniques and some of the chemicals used in the industrial method may not have been readily available at the time of its development.
Although there were slight differences in ingredients, it is believed that this was not very significant in altering the timing of century egg completion observed at the end of the two experiments. Finally, the eggs involved in the industrial method were left outdoors in the UK and the eggs involved in the traditional method were left indoors in China, suggesting there may be slight differences due to the temperature because China generally has a higher temperature in the summer than the UK.
Temperature affects the rate of reaction in general and the rate of diffusion, which means it could alter the speed of century egg formation since the alkaline conditions could penetrate the eggshell to alter the protein structure faster at its optimum temperature [10].
The eggs from the industrial method were not able to be sent to a laboratory for composition analysis so only the composition of the eggs of the traditional method could be discussed. The eggs did not completely form into century eggs using the suggested traditional method and therefore the composition was compared to a store-bought century egg to see if the stage of formation the eggs were at could be concluded [9]. This can be seen from Table 2 as there is a noticeable difference between the duck century egg produced through the traditional method and the century egg bought on the market.
This could mean that the century eggs produced were still not close to completion. Since the eggs in the traditional method were not completed during the 10 days, it can not be said which method would have taken longer. Furthermore, the eggs in the industrial method were only opened after 45 days, meaning they could have been completed at an earlier date.
Without a mathematical or scientific technique to extrapolate the results in the traditional method, it could not be determined which method would have taken longer for completion. Another plausible explanation would be due to the individual compositional differences between eggs. Since the differences shown in Table 2 are not very large and not all the composition differences fall between both the bought duck egg and century egg, this explanation may be more likely.
Furthermore, it can be concluded that the industrial method was developed as an improved method for manufacturing purposes. A lot of effort was required in terms of preparing the eggs during the traditional method since each had to be physically wrapped with a layer of the clay mixture and then rice hulls.
This would certainly require manual work from employed workers and thus it is not only a time-consuming preparation process but it would also require more money to hire employees. On the other hand, the industrial method only required placing the eggs in the feed solution, which could be done by machines, and does not require as much time for the preparation process.
This would cut down the cost of production and increase the profit margins for large factories dramatically. Table 3 has many differences when compared to the results found for the traditional method. First, there is an 80 kJ 19 kcal energy difference between the century egg from Table 3 and the duck century egg, from the traditional method, in Table 2. Also, the duck century egg produced from the traditional method was It is most likely down to the unique nutritional composition of each egg.
Table 3. As there was very limited time available, it would be optimal to repeat the two experiments, especially since the traditional method did not see the completion of the process. This would allow observations to be confirmed and for a more complete set of results to be given. In the future, an experiment that alters the ingredient composition could be done to see which one of the ingredients is the most important and which ingredients can be reduced.
This would involve two sets of experiments that involves both of the methods while altering the amount of only one ingredient at a time. This should show which ingredient impacts each method the most, allowing for optimised mixtures to be identified and to reduce the cost of production, to bring a potential economic benefit. There could also be an experiment done to see if it matters which alkaline is best in forming century eggs.
This is because fundamentally it is the alkaline conditions in which these eggs are placed under that causes them to transform into century eggs.
So, a possible question that could be answered is if the strength and type of alkali would affect the time it takes to form century eggs. Further research should investigate the effect of temperature change has on century egg formation to find the optimum temperature.
This could be done by doing both of the methods under different temperature conditions and within the same geographical location.
Lastly, a potential experiment could be set up to observe whether a change in the permeability of duck eggs would allow the compounds to penetrate faster and hence reduce the time it takes for the century eggs to form.
With these further research ideas, the processing of century eggs could be optimised. This may be by processing the eggs with the fewest ingredients required and leaving the eggs in a temperature that reduces the time it takes for century eggs to form.
Also, there could be methods of chemically altering the eggshells so that the chemicals would diffuse into the egg faster. All these improvements could lead to even cheaper production price and greater production yield so the profits of these century eggs would be maximised. Through the two experiments, the observational results for the industrial method saw the century eggs fully form, meanwhile the eggs both chicken and duck in the traditional method showed some progress towards the completed formation of century eggs.
There are a few hypothesized explanations for this incompletion, including the possibility that the containers opened towards the end were not an airtight environment or there was not enough time given under those conditions. Through this research, it remains unclear as to which method took the longest for century eggs to fully form from.
This is due to an insufficient time period of 10 days for the traditional method and only opening the eggs made using the industrial method after 45 days [8][9]. Secondly, there was a difference in temperature environment, indicating that the rate of reaction and diffusion would have been different for the two experiments and thus a more reliable comparison is needed.
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