Sometimes you find yourself walking around the streets of Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon) late at night trying to find a restaurant that tourists wouldn’t go to. What we found was Le La Quan, a place so local that the people who worked in the restaurant barely spoke a word of English and the menu was only available in Vietnamese.
Yet, through it all we managed to place some orders. While I was really only there for a beer, one of my companions ordered some chicken. But not just any chicken – chicken ovaries. I couldn’t turn down the opportunity to eat these, so I dug in.
The first thing you notice is that they look like Satan’s egg yolks. In that I mean they were yellow, but veiny in an intimidating way. Yet, I dug in and found that it was more like a combination of hard boiled egg yolk and egg white in one. It had the flavor of egg yolk, but was much more rubbery in texture. And yet still not quite as rubbery as egg whites.
Of course, I probably could have guessed that chicken ovaries would taste a lot like chicken “pre-eggs,” but you never know until you try and now that I’ve tried, you probably don’t have to.
Hamburgers was once strange to me when I arrived in Canada. You should try balut eggs.