How To Prepare A Century Egg "Pei Dan"

Welcome to my first "How To" post. Since I was talking about cooking Logong's fave "Pei Dan Jok" or Century Egg Pork Porridge, I thought it'd be most useful to have a detailed posting on how to handle this strange-looking egg. You will be interested to know in one episode of the American "Fear Factor" they made the contestants eat this "100 year-old egg"! If only I had participated in that contest haha!

When you buy a century egg from the market, this is how the "pei dan" looks like:

It looks like an egg that has been packed with brown mud and saw dust / rice husks! It's made from duck's egg if I am not wrong, and preserved using what I do not know! I will "Google" it when I have the time hehe!

Anyway I hate getting my hands dirty, so I like to remove the mud surrounding the egg by using the plastic wrap (that comes with the egg) or a plastic bag! Just hold the egg with both hands, and use the thumbs to just push or scrape the mud off the egg, whichever works best. Here's how:

Use both thumbs!

You do not need to remove 100% of the mud; you can wash off whatever remains and it should be clean enough like this:

Proceed to peel off the shell like you would a hard-boiled egg. Be gentle, but it's not as fragile as a raw chicken's egg. Here's how a peeled century egg looks like:

See the snowflakes-like crystals in the egg? This is a very well-preserved egg! And if the yolk looks watery like this, this shows it's an even better century egg! I was lucky mom got such a nice fresh egg for me! :D

People would cut it into wedges lengthwise, and serve raw with pickled ginger as an appetiser (super yummy!) For cooking my porridge, I dice it into smaller pieces like so:

This is ready to go right into the porridge and you could eat this raw, so there's no need to overcook the century egg or it will melt!

Now this century egg is not so scary to prepare or eat, is it? :)

"Pei Dan Jok" or Century Egg Pork Porridge =)

"Pei Dan Jok" or Century Egg Pork Porridge is my Hubby's all-time fave breakfast (or lunch) food. If you bring him to have dim sum, just give him this and a char siew bun and he's a happy boy! Quite easy to please eh?

I decided to make my mom's very own recipe and got mom to help me get the raw pork (I have a phobia of handling raw meat, so I hope Logong you appreciate this!) + century egg from the market days before CNY. Mom told me with some bones added, the dish (be it porridge / soup) will be "sweeter" & tastier. After much delay (I had not realised meat takes so long to defost!) I managed to cook this for Logong on 31 Jan 2009.

So here you go, the ingredients:

Please refer to my post on how to deal with the century egg which could be really strange if it's your first time seeing / hearing about it haha!

You will need to marinate the meat with lots of salt (preferably overnight, or at least 2-3 hours before cooking). Then about 2-3 hours before you start cooking, add some oil to the rice to "condition" it. I use about 1 tbsp of oil to 1/2 (half) cup of rice (I chose Japanese just for fun, and you could use Thai Jasmine rice). You may also soak the dried scallops to soften them.



When ready to cook, boil some hot water to scald the meat; discard the water as this step serves to clean the meat and remove any unpleasant meat smell / taste. Into a pot, add the rice, pork and scallops. Fill half the pot with water (about 10 times the volume of rice you are cooking) and bring to a boil over high heat. When the water is boiling, lower heat to let the porridge simmer. At this point it looks like you are going to have rice soup (I warned my Hubby because I feared I had added too much water!) but be patient.

Meanwhile you can go prepare the century egg, which I have detailed in a separate post.

After about 30-40 mins, your pot's contents should look like porridge! If it's too thick, add some water! If too watery still, continue to simmer and let the liquid reduce. The thickness of porridge is very much to individual taste, so you have to judge for yourself here.



Remove the meat (not the bones!) from the pot and cut the meat into bite-sized pieces. I like to use scissors because it's easier! Put these meat pieces back into the porridge; You can now add the chopped century egg into the porridge mixture too. Let the mixture simmer for about 10-15mins more till you get the preferred consistency; you may also wish to taste your porridge now for the salt level. Because the meat has been salted overnight, by right you do not need to add any; however this is to personal taste, so add accordingly.



Voila, here's the completed "Pei Dan Jok"!



Enjoy!

Learning To Cook 101: Breakfasts!

I am blessed with a mother who is a great cook; the irony is none of her three children could cook (well)! However ever since my sister-in-law moved in with my mom after I got married, all of us are slowly interested in learning to cook from mom because it took my sis-in-law to make us appreciate mom's cooking knowledge. I've always loved to bake more than cook; as we grow older, we also realised home-cooked food really is a luxury and before we know it, once my mom is too old to cook, all these family dishes would be lost forever! Problem is, the kitchen is always the domain (kingdom) of the mothers -- this is true of everyone I know! Just as there's a Chinese saying that one mountain cannot be inhabited by two tigers, no kitchen can be ruled by two "queens". We had to do things exactly the way mom wanted or else it's scolding time! Therefore it was always easier to just stay out of the kitchen! After I got married, we stayed with my in-laws, so it goes without saying who dominates there...

So you could say with my own home and kitchen now, and a new oven and Kitchen Aid mixer to boot, I have no excuse not to bake and cook anymore! Without further ado, let me share with you what I cooked for Logong today for breakfast (err... brunch)! The very first sumptous breakfast I had cooked for Logong was the day after we "officially" moved into our own flat. Here you go:

This was my attempt to cook the lovely hot breakfasts we ate almost daily when we were in Tasmania, Australia for our honeymoon in 2003. There's always a nice grilled tomato (substituted by fresh cherry tomatoes here) and sauteed mushrooms which I love. The eggs and sausages make this a power-packed (and arteries-clogging!) breakfast which gave us enough energy to go exploring the rest of our days! If you look at the time stamp on this pic, this was actually our brunch *LOL*

Today, I cooked eggs and mushrooms for Logong and he ate everything; this makes me really happy, but it was the way he ate all my century egg pork porridge ("Pei Dan Jok")yesterday which really warms my heart :) I learnt from mom how to cook this fave dish of Logong's; supposed to cook this during the CNY holidays but I did not expect the meat to take so long to defrost, so I could only cook it yesterday. Please see my next post for my yummy "Pei Dan Jok"! ;)