Twenty-Four Flavours: Century Egg by Adan Jimenez

We take a sniff at the strange black egg in this second issue of TWENTY-FOUR FLAVOURS. You either love it or hate it, this ‘food’, this ‘hundred-year-old’ legend: there’s no in-between. Despite its name, though, the century egg isn’t really kept over a century. You know—by now !—that the curing process needs only several months at the most; and that the chemical changes cause snowflake or pine-branch-like patterns to appear near the surface of the egg white. Hence its other name, pine-patterned egg.