Have you ever eaten an egg as transparent as jelly? My hometown calls it biandan.
Mentioning biandan reminds me of the summers of my childhood, when my family would always make some biandan, and after about ten days they were ready to eat. Because my hometown is in the countryside, we all called them biandan there. Later I found out that they are also called pidan. Back then there were many itinerant traders who went from street to street, specializing in making biandan.
1. What kind of egg is biandan?
In summer, biandan goes best with beer. Dress a few biandan cold, add a bottle of ice-cold beer, and it feels like a whole day's tiredness is gone. Where I come from, biandan refers to eggs wrapped in a mixture of quicklime and sawdust. Because quicklime gives off heat when it meets water, the eggs then undergo a reaction, and generally after about a week, the eggs are ready to eat.
And the egg white turns yellow and transparent, like jelly, while the yolk is fragrant and runny, and it is very tasty served cold. Just talking about it makes me want to eat two right away. In some places, songhua eggs are also called biandan. The big difference between songhua eggs and biandan is that songhua eggs are made from duck eggs, while biandan are made from chicken eggs. And the process of making songhua eggs is a bit more complicated than that of biandan.
2. How is biandan made?
When the weather got hot in my childhood, my mother would make some biandan. Many mobile vendors riding tricycles would call out that they made biandan, and the labor fee seemed to be a few fen per egg; we just had to provide the eggs. But nowadays you hardly ever see these traders who go from street to street.
The materials for biandan are quicklime and sawdust or grain chaff. First, mix edible alkali, quicklime and clean water in a certain ratio into a paste, then put the eggs in and coat them evenly with a layer of the paste, then roll them in a layer of sawdust. Wrap up the eggs coated with sawdust, that is, put them in a place that is not ventilated so they undergo the change. This process generally depends on the weather temperature; when the temperature is high it usually takes five or six days, and when it is a bit lower about a week. Then air-dry the wrapped eggs for a day or two, and they are basically ready to eat.