My first 'balut'

This may seem oddly unadventurous for someone who came halfway around the world to live in the Philippines, but I’ve been here over a decade without ever once cracking open a fertilized duck egg, sucking down its juices and forking its embryonic contents into my mouth. In short, I’ve never eaten — nor felt any desire to eat — balut.

Until last week, that is.

For some reason, the usual bowl of eggs was proffered at a Filipino diner gathering — the white speckly ones and the ones dyed purple — and after getting asked for about the 100th time by a Filipino if I’d ever tried balut, I finally gave in.

The fact that people have been bugging me to try balut all these years never really bothered me; but as I said, something just made me want to tick this item off my 2009 “F**k It” list (this is what I have instead of a bucket list, because I’ve noticed there are a lot of things in life we don’t try due to some self-created fears and obstacles. Sometimes, as the character in Risky Business put it, you’ve just gotta say “What the f**k”).

Curious onlookers caught my initiation on video (I posted it on my Facebook page), but it wasn’t really as though the heavens parted and I finally saw the light descending on my bored palate. Nor did I feel like I was doing anything particularly brave — even my daughter eats balut. It just seemed like something I wanted to finally “get out of the way” so I could move on with my life. 

Why now? Who knows? You see that crazy egg, you watch people winking and smirking at you, you feel like a lifelong contestant on Fear Factor, and you just want to have done with it.

So my wife showed me how to crack the egg. I tilted back the shell, felt the warm juices trickle down my throat — and nearly hurled.

No, it wasn’t that bad. Not really. It was kind of gamey, much like beef broth (guess that would be all that protein-rich amniotic fluid). Next came the yellow part, which I forked onto a plate, dipping its boiled egg flakiness into a little pile of salt and sending that down the hatch. And then… and then I was done for the day. No baby chick for me, thank you. It’d taken me over 10 years to even attempt the balut; I could probably wait another decade before tackling the chick.

So what’s the big deal about balut? I’m not sure, because I’ve eaten other stuff in the Philippines that is arguably more difficult to get your head around. Dinuguan stew is made from the blood, liver, heart and kidneys of pigs, a fact I was not 100-percent clear about when I first sopped up some of its horror-movie richness with a few pieces of absorbent puto bread a few years back. I’ve had something that was made from lamb brains here, though the name of the dish now escapes me. I’ve even had coffee beans crapped out by civet cats, then collected, roasted and sold to roadside customers in Tagaytay. No problems there.

But of course, it’s all about the visual. Balut has that final money shot — the embryonic chick, bones, feathers and all — sitting there at the bottom of the Cracker Jack box. That’s what gets Filipinos excited, and creeps out the foreigners. 

We don’t really like seeing babies in our meals. We don’t like being reminded that something we’re about to consume once had parents. That’s why most food we eat is disguised, made to look aesthetic or innocuous. We don’t necessarily want to go eye-to-eye with the frozen death grimace of a sacrificed animal at mealtimes. So it takes balls to serve something as in-your-face as lechon, which looks exactly like what it is: a slow-cooked pig.

Eating balut has become a common initiation rite for foreign bands and performers who visit Manila. Harry Connick Jr. famously ate one onstage, chick and all. The band Switchfoot also chug-a-lugged theirs onstage. It’s become such a rite-of-passage cliché that TV chef Anthony Bourdain declined the balut when he came here, preferring the four-way goat prepared in Pampanga (he’d already sucked down balut in Cambodia, so it was already passé to him).

After mentioning my balut experience online, people suggested wonderful variations (“Try fried balut — lightly sauté the balut in butter and top with toasted garlic. Yummy!” and “Athletes like to have balut shake. Throw in a couple eggs, a little milk and you’re good to go”). I’m not ready yet. Sorry.

Honestly, eating balut for the first time did not send me into paroxysms of gastronomic pleasure. Nor did it send me to the hospital. But at least I can say I did it, I’ve done it, it’s done. So the next time someone asks me “Have you tried balut?” I can honestly answer yes, and if I’m feeling up for another dose of its meaty, slightly oily and queasy taste, my stomach won’t start churning in protest.