The Mysterious World of Century Eggs
Century egg wholesalers across Asia have quietly built a robust commercial network that stretches from small-scale producers in rural villages to gleaming urban supermarkets and high-end restaurants. These preserved delicacies—also known as thousand-year eggs, pidan, or century-old eggs—have been a staple in Chinese cuisine for centuries, though they actually require only weeks or months to produce. The preservation process, which involves coating duck, chicken or quail eggs in a mixture of clay, ash, salt, quicklime and rice husks for several weeks to months, transforms the whites into a translucent dark brown or black jelly, …