Phạm Trường Hà
I used to work in Oakland. During lunchtime on Friday, I would head over to the farmers market near Chinatown to chase down the fertilized duck egg guy.
These eggs are known as Hot Vit Lon, pronounced as Hope-Yit-Lom, to the Vietnamese and Balut to the Filipinos. You don’t bring these bad boys home to hatch. You boil these babies up and eat them like hard-boiled eggs, but with something very different inside. They are delicious and freaky at the same time.
If you never heard of this type of egg and are willing to give it a try, don’t ask what it is or see what’s inside.
Just cook them up, close your eyes and try them. Most likely you will find them to be very tasty. If you decide to look them up and learn more about them, you might get squeamish.
These eggs have appeared on shows such as Fear Factor where contestants do crazy stunts and eat crazy things. It cracked me up, pun intended, that a Vietnamese contestant on one episode happily ate the fertilized duck eggs as one of the challenges. While others were crying and puking, he ate the eggs happily.
That’s because in Vietnam, among other Southeast Asian countries, Hot Vit Lon eggs are a nutritious delicacy. Also, they are said to have healing effects for women after giving birth and of course, like all other weird food, it’s believed to improve sexual virility in men.
So what’s inside that makes these eggs different? These fetal duck eggs contains an embryo of about 14 to 17 days old. There are beaks, feathers, legs … the whole shabang of a baby duck.
And you eat the thing whole thing … head, bones and all. I once brought these into my company office to show my curious non-Asian coworkers. That was a fun lunch.
If you are daring, below are some instructions how to eat Hot Vit Lon.
