Hong Kong can be a minefield of strange smells and even stranger tastes. Below you’ll find a profile of weird Hong Kong foods that are worth trying.
Thousand Year Old Eggs
If you can brave a thousand-year-old egg, you can consider yourself an honorary Hong Konger – these things are potent! They are made from duck or quail eggs buried in a clay, sand and salt mixture for a couple of months.
The shell of the egg turns a browny, black, but it’s the inside where the real surprise awaits. The yolk turns dark green and boasts a powerful smell of, well, eggs that have sat around for a couple of months. The eggs can be picked up whole from street vendors around the city or found sliced up in noodle dishes.
Birds Nest Soup
One of Hong Kong’s most prized delicacies, Bird’s Nest Soup is a gelatinous mix of chicken broth and swiftlet’s (a type of bird) saliva. That’s right, you’re eating swiftlet's spit.
Swiftlets make their nests from saliva and each year, after the bird has left the nest, it’s harvested and added to the soup. Like many things in the city the soup is famed for its health benefits, though environment-minded eaters avoid it because the industry may endanger swiftlet populations.
If you’re still inclined to try some, visit a Cantonese restaurant to order large steaming bowls of bird’s nest soup – then dig in!
Chicken Feet
The
Chinese like to say about themselves, “
Beijing people dare to say anything, Guangdong [Cantonese] people dare to eat anything,
Shanghai people dare to wear anything.” The Cantonese of Hong Kong prove this by turning a rejected part of the chicken into a cherished dim sum dish.
Your biggest obstacle to eating chicken feet is their appearance: these wrinkled, claw like tidbits look like something from a witch’s cauldron. Luckily, they taste better than anything else the wicked witch could cook up, if a little crunchy. Steamed chicken feet are a staple at dim sum restaurants across Hong Kong, one of the most affordable exotic items on this short list.
Chicken Testicles
A favorite at hotpot restaurants in Hong Kong, diners chow down on chicken testicles, or gai zi, for their supposed aphrodisiac properties. “The Chinese – especially Hong Kong Chinese – believe in 'you are what you eat',” the South China Morning Post’s Luisa Tam explains. “So you eat the organ to actually nurture your organ."
Before eating it, dip the gai zi in the hotpot broth; it’s ready when the exterior turns opaque white. The interior remains soft, exploding inside your mouth when you chomp down on the firm exterior. Have them with rice, or noodles and broth.
Turtle Jelly
Turtle jelly, or gwei ling go in Cantonese, is another naughty delicacy that doesn't impress any environmentalist. Powdered turtle shells and bellies are boiled for up to twelve hours, mixed with herbs and lotions and served up as a type of jelly-like soup.
Turtle jelly enthusiasts in Hong Kong swear by turtle jelly’s medicinal properties – it’s supposed to be a cooling food, helping with coughs, indigestion, and eczema; while beautifying the skin. Authentic turtle jelly – made from the ground-up shells of the Cuora trifasciata turtle farmed on the mainland – can be prohibitively expensive, costing about HKD 300 (or about US$40) per cup. Most of the commercially available turtle jelly in Hong Kong actually contains no turtle shell.
Snake Soup
Snake soup is considered somewhat of a gourmet dish and a famed winter warmer. Most of the city’s snake meat is now delivered chilled or frozen from China, but to try the meat and the soup at its best you need to have it fresh.
This means braving the handful of live snake restaurants that still exist in Kowloon. Here, you pluck your favourite python or cobra from behind a cage and watch him slither to the chopping block, with more unusual snakes attracting heavier price tags.
The soup comes with the snake shredded inside, although, if you’re braver, you can try sliced snake in a host of other dishes. As it seems with almost all exotic meats many say it tastes like chicken.
Sea Cucumber
The Chinese prize four seafoods above all, christening them “the four treasures”: sea cucumbers, shark fin, abalone and fish maw (swim bladders). Sea cucumbers are perhaps the least likely to end up as food, but the Chinese love it nonetheless, eating it in soup or stir-fried.
You’d think sea cucumber would be slimy and slightly rubbery and you’d be right. Beginners should try it fried as this takes away some of the slippery texture, or on a bed of noodles or rice with an accompanying sauce. Demand for sea cucumber has devastated many far-flung ecosystems, so avoid if the environment matters to you.
See more: Top 9 Asian daring delicacies
Source: Internet
