I’ll touch on some of the Philippine street foods that he tasted:
Balut – this maybe the most famous Filipino delicacies having appeared several times on the TV show Fear Factor and forever changing the lives of those contestants. Balut is an 18 days old fertilized duck embryo. It is usually sold on the streets. Balut vendors starts to come out late in the afternoon and yells “Balut”.
Here’s Andrew Zimmern’s description of what a balut taste like which is really amusing, “one of strangest food that I have eaten in my entire life but so unexpectedly better than the way I thought it would be…very very very very very eggy.. think hard boiled eggs times 17 with a little bit of roasted poultry flavor thrown in there to the mix… the juice from inside there is the funky part…” Defiinitely, a must try Philippine delicacy.
Honestly, I haven’t mustered the courage to eat the whole balut. I have only eaten the white and yellow part and drank the juice but I just can’t bite into that little duck. Perhaps you can challenge me to eat that when you get here?!
Mangrove Worm or locally known as Tamilok – When I visited Palawan back in 2010, I also went to Kinabuch and ordered for these mangrove worms. (Yes just like Zimmern, some locals also invited us to try the freshly caught mangrove worms near the Puerto Princesa Underground River but we just have to pass, we need a beer to swallow those weird looking creatures down.) The worms were served with chili vinegar. Here’s a video of me feeling adventurous and trying to swallow the mangrove worms:
The taste is not that bad. It tastes like oyster with a weird woody flavor. I actually ate one or two more worms. We had fun playing with our taste buds in Kinabuch since we also ordered Adobadong Crocodile (crocodile cooked in adobo style). Let me know when you try it too.