Homemade Salted Eggs (家居咸蛋）

INTRODUCTION

Chinese dumpling festival is approaching and I thought I want to try making some salted egg yolks for my dumplings.. If you are Singaporean, you will know that there are no fresh duck eggs being sold  in Singapore.. Don’t ask me the reasons but my egg supplier told me that it is a government regulation that no duck eggs shall be imported into Singapore.. She further disclosed that it was possibly due to the bird flu incidence many many years back… I did not testify such statement but I can only tell you it was not sold in Singapore at the time of issuing this report..

Since there are no duck eggs, I have tried my luck to use chicken eggs after one Facebook friends referred me to Ms. Lily Ng’s website whom she also used chicken eggs in the preparation.. It is my fault that I did not follow her instructions and I come out with my own home version which have more wastage.. But such wastage is rather cost negligible because salt is relatively cheap and the saline solution can be reused many times.

Is there any difference between the salted duck egg yolk and salted chicken egg yolk? In my humble opinion, there is not much difference at all, the only noticeable difference is that it is much smaller in size than than the duck eggs. In order to have the beautiful and orangey yolk, I have told my egg supplier that I want one that have an orange egg yolk if there is .. She gave me a box of 10 white colour shell kampong chicken eggs and the price is slightly higher at about S$2,70 for a box of 10 (normal is S$2 a box of 10).

Though the original recipe called for 3 weeks, I found some of the yolks have refused to harden even after 4 weeks. That possibly due to the fact I did not follow the recipe closely initially as the osmosis did not took place..

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WHAT IS REQUIRED

• Some chicken eggs (“White” shelled kampong chicken eggs or duck eggs preferred)
• Some Chinese cooking wine or any cooking alcohol
• Adequate salt to cover the eggs (sea salt preferred)
• A bottle to accommodate the eggs (Glass bottle preferred)

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STEPS OF PREPARATION

• Rinse the eggs with the cooking wine. In a sterilized bottle, put some salt and arrange the eggs as compact as you can. Cover all with the salt. If there is any cooking wine left, pour inside the bottle. Pour adequate COOLED COOKED WATER to cover the eggs. Close the lid and let it sit inside the bottle for at least 3 weeks – 4 weeks.

• After 3 weeks, take out an egg, crack and check if the yolk has harden. Otherwise, you will have to wait until all the yolks have harden.

Note:

• White colour kampong chicken eggs are preferred. Tell your egg supplier that you need yolks that are orangey. Duck eggs if available is still the best choice. Cooking wine will enhance the colour the egg yolks.

• Check the eggs and ensure that there are no crack in the eggs.

• If you are not willing to use so much salt, the basic ratio is 1 cup of sea salt to 4 cups of water. However, in this illustration, I have used about 1 cup of salt to 1 cup of water as I believed it will expedite the process. The salt did not dissolved in so little liquid. Overall salt that I used is about SS1.50.

• In  this adventure, about 3 are not as hard as I wanted. Possibly  they are those that floated on top of the saline water.

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CONCLUSION

i am lucky that this adventure worked wonder for me and I will be using this batch for my dumpling.  I hope it works well for you too. I am preparing another batch using the same saline water and I will know in another 21 days. Should there be any new development, I will update the post.

Hope you like the post today. Cheers and have a nice day.

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