From Sea to Salted Eggs

Text and photos by Austin Bush

Saengjan Chuaykoet prepares eggs for preservation in her home in Chaiya.

Chaiya, in the southern Thai province of Surat Thani, is little more than two parallel streets bordered by a string of old wooden shophouses and a sleepy train station. It’s about five miles from the Gulf of Thailand as the crow flies and has long been a destination for Chinese immigrants. They originally arrived there via sea, bringing with them both ducks and novel ways to preserve food, two elements that have contributed to the town’s most famous culinary export.

“Salted eggs are Chinese,” says Saengjan Chuaykoet, who along with her sister, is the third generation to produce the dish in Chaiya. “It was a way of preserving food.”

On the surface, salted eggs might seem a distinctly landlubber dish, but they actually owe much to the ocean. In addition to probably having arrived in Thailand via Chinese sailors, salted eggs were, initially at least, made directly in the sea.

“In the old days, people used to bury the eggs in sand in mangrove forests,” Saengjan tells me in her home factory, a slightly lopsided wooden structure a brief walk from Chaiya’s railway station, where she and her sister preserve thousands of eggs by hand every day. “My grandma started preserving them in soil; they’re not as salty, and they can be kept longer.”

Saengjan and her sister have strayed little from their grandparents’ technique. Every day, the pair take fresh, local duck eggs and coat them in a mixture of coarse sea salt, water and the almost powderlike fine soil from toppled termite mounds. Why termite mounds, I wondered aloud? “Normal dirt doesn’t stick to the eggs,” explained Saengjan, matter-of-factly. She added that duck, rather than chicken, eggs are favored for salt preservation because of their inherently rich yolks and thick shells.

Encased in their muddy jackets, the eggs are layered in rice husk ash for protection and then boxed up. Wait a week or two, and you have subtly salty eggs with just-firm yolks that can be fried, sunny side up, as the locals do; they’re also excellent when steamed over minced, seasoned pork. Wait three weeks, and you have eggs with a lively though not overwhelming salty whites and firm, just-salty yolks; hard-boiled and quartered, their salinity countered via lime juice and sugar, slices of onion, chili and Chinese celery, they’re the basis of one of Thailand’s favorite late-night snacks.

“It’s not complicated,” Saengjan tells me. “Just soil, salt and water. The most important thing is the eggs.” She goes on to explain that in the past, Chaiya’s ducks were let loose in flooded rice fields, where they ate a protein-heavy diet, the secret behind those rich, sunset-hued yolks. These days, although the ducks are raised on farms, they’re fed a diet that’s heavy in shrimp.

Saengjan offers me a hard-boiled salted egg, sliced in half directly through the shell. “Eat a bit of the yolk with the egg white,” she urged, “it won’t taste too salty that way.”

The bite combined a white with none of the overwhelming salinity or unpleasant chalkiness of lesser-quality salted eggs, and a yolk with a deep orange color and rich, rather than salty, flavor—a delicious and unexpected union of land, sea, migration and preservation.

Salted eggs start with eggs from the area’s ducks, which are fed a protein rich diet.

After being coated in a mixture of salt, water and the soil from termite mounds, the eggs are then layered in the ash that results from burning rice husks, to separate and protect them.

Hard-boiled salted eggs served with the shell on.