this post was submitted on 13 Apr 2025
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皮蛋 a.k.a. "century egg" or, more boringly, "preserved egg".
I get it. I really do. Everything about these from the colour to the texture to the aroma to the flavour is highly alien to most people's tastebuds. (It took me ten years to warm up to them myself!) But now that I pushed through it, they're one of my favourite things.
...edited to add this picture for those who are unfamiliar:
I got in a huge argument with someone who actually thought they were preserved for 100 years…
So with someone who doesn't understand how reality works. Got it. 🤣
Could you imagine? You’d need to fund a company for 100 years with potentially 0 profit
Sometimes I wonder what people are thinking.
Then I remember most people don't think.
I mean there's tea that you can buy that's aged about 30 years. That stuff is horrifically expensive because the capital outlay with ZERO return on it is massive. (I drank a tea that was actually 99 years old once, back in about 2003. It cost roughly twenty bucks in 2003 money for a thimble-sized teacup's worth. Yes, it was worth it.)
You can also get liquors that are aged 25+ years here. Again, it's hugely expensive because of the outlay vs. return ratio.
And both of these only work by also selling younger versions: for the liquors 3 years and for teas anywhere from a year on up.
A hundred years? And yet you sell them for a price of about $1.5 for ten? (First search page on Taobao, randomly selected shop: https://detail.tmall.com/item.htm?id=683692822495)
It's not just that, it's also that alcohol evaporates. I mostly know single malts - where the evaporation is called 'the angel's share'. It's a couple of percent per year of storage (in Scotland). That might not sound like much but after 30 years at 2% you'll have lost about 45% of your initial volume.
Evaporation when covered in clay is slowed by quite a bit, but yeah, 25+ years will still lose you volume.
I may have a business idea for the US market
Selling pre-rotted eggs? 🤣