Our dear ducks have provided us with many duck eggs in the past few months, right up until a few weeks ago. Not ever having kept ducks before, I wasn't prepared for them to go off the lay so suddenly. From a couple of dozen a week to nothing was rather distressing.
If you haven't eaten a duck egg then you are missing out on one of life's great egg eating feasts. The yolks are almost twice the size of a normal hen's egg, and the richness is delightful in even the simplest of recipes. If you are used to eating supermarket eggs, then perhaps you may not understand why an omelet with nothing but a few herbs can be a gastronomic pleasure.
In the meantime we we have come across another farmer selling fresh duck eggs. As we get requests all the time at the markets for them, we bought a few dozen to satisfy our customer's wants, and a few to satisfy mine. A slight miscalculation on my part (let's just call it a selling frenzy one Sunday) and the only dozen I had was at home and already potted up in a salty brine.
Salted duck eggs are an interesting way to save and eat the duck's bounty. After a time in the salty brine, the eggs are boiled then sliced into salads, and other dishes. The spices and chilli impart a slight flavour to the egg, the salt gets leached out in the cooking and there is an incredible depth of flavour in every bite. Many Asian cuisines use them as a condiment, just as we would use a salsa to add a little something to a dish.
Originally I had been told that the eggs go in the brine for 31 days and then they are ready to eat. So our first jar was consumed within a matter of days. A bit more research and I now learn that from day 14 onwards until about day 62 you can keep your eggs in their briny jar, and only pull out what you need as you need them. Our dozen in the picture is at day 7, so only another week to go before we can have our first few. Note: they don't look any different on day 14, or day 31 for that matter!
Make your own Salted Duck Eggs
The recipe is simple. Make sure you have a large sealable jar that will hold the number of eggs you have on hand. Also it is a good idea to make sure the egg shells are clean. Ducks can be rather messy around their nests and we don't want any of that muck in our food! Yew....
Measure the amount of water it will take to fill your jar. This will be more than you need, but is an easy starting point. Bring it to the boil in a large pot then turn it off, it's now time to start adding the salt. I use sea salt and start with about a good cup's worth - you can see my jar is quite large though. Stir until it dissolves. If all the salt disolves then add some more. You'll know when there is enough in the water when there are salt crystals still undissolved. For some reason water can only accept a certain amount of salt before it becomes saturated.*
Once your water is fully salted, just allow it to cool to room temperature. Patience is a virtue at this stage. If it is too warm your eggs will start to cook. When cool place your eggs in the jar, top up with the salt and hey presto you are almost home.
At this point if you fancy nothing more than the tang of salt in your eggs, place a weight** of some sorts in the top of the pot to keep the eggs submerged and then seal. Put in a dark cupboard and leave for at least 14 days.
If like me you can't help being a mad scientist, go crazy with your spices. This month I've shoved a pile of chillis into the jar along with a few star anise. Can't predict how this will turn out, so we'll have to wait and see in a week's time.
How to eat Salted Duck Eggs.
This is where the research fun starts again. Some people tell me to boil like normal, others to boil for a long time. There seems to be no real answer to this question, and for every person I ask there is another answer to think about.
On my first go I was very confused, but Madhur Jaffrey came to my rescue. Bless her. Looking through her Vegetarian cookbook she just happened to mention that she boils her eggs for about an hour, changing the water three times. The water changes help to remove the saltiness from the egg. I'm not a lover of salt, and can recommend you do the same.
Once boiled, peel and then slice into salads, curries or rice dishes. The eggs behave exactly the same way as a hard boiled egg - except there aren't any nasty blue rings around the yolk. In fact, the long cooking time doesn't seem to affect the texture in the same way as a traditional normal egg. The additional flavour from the salting and spices is subtle yet wonderful.
When I started these eggs a week ago we were having crazy phenomonal heatwave temperatures, the place was hotter than hades, so my thoughts were to cook up a cooling gado gado which would be perfect with the eggs.
This week though, we're experiencing an Alaskan winter (is that the opposite of an Indian Summer?). Perhaps the eggs may hold up well to a hot curry sauce with rice and veg. I'm open to suggestions.
*I think the key to this saturation is sea water. Living too far from the sea I can't grab a pot and see if salt water will absorb any more salt. Thinking it through though, salt is made in places like France by the evaporation of sea water, and as the water evaporates the salt forms. This all makes sense to me, as this is an Asian inspired preserving solution. Perhaps a community living by the sea discovered this as a way of preserving eggs. They would have been able to run out and grab the salt water by the bucketful to save their eggs. In days gone by, it may have been a bit hard to grab a packet of Saxa salt anytime you wanted to brine some eggs.
**I'm not awfully creative with weights and never seem to have a dish or anything that will work to keep all good things submerged. The other day though I discovered a brining cure for some meat, and the suggestion was to fill a ziplock bag with excess brining solution and float that on the top of the bottle. The brine helps to keep the whole lot submerged, and if for some reason the bag leaks, the brining solution isn't compromised by the addition of plain water. Brilliant! You'll see my bag jammed into the top of the picture.
I'm going to start calling you Martha.
Posted by: Paqueenie | February 27, 2009 at 03:24 PM
No, no, no...not Martha...please!!
Wait until I cook the lamb roast once we finally send our baby ram to the abattoirs, and you may come up with some other name that is far more appropriate. Does Martha do a segment on how to butcher a lamb?
Posted by: cath | February 27, 2009 at 03:35 PM