Balut Is a Filipino Delicacy
Written on May 13, 2026
Whenever I think of "balut", I think of the egg with legs in the old cartoons from the 1960s. A chicken that's not quite ready to hatch.
Balut is a fertilized developing egg embryo, boiled and eaten from the shell. It can be a chicken egg or a duck egg. The most common is supposedly made with a duck egg, but I've only seen those from chickens.
Balut Isn't a Street Food
Perhaps it started out that way, but it's now sold in various markets. I remember, when I was in the Philippines in the 1980s, frequently hearing the street vendors yelling out "balut" as they walked from street to street.
I haven't heard it at all since 2006, when I moved to the Philippines. Perhaps it's because our house isn't close to the downtown areas, or perhaps it isn't as popular as it once was.
My Filipino daughter-in-law, Cathy can eat balut every day of the week. She found some at a place called Seafood City in Waipahu, one of the many cities we regularly visited on the island of Oahu in Hawaii several years ago.
I couldn't find another place where it was sold on the island, and I didn't want to look for it. We went to Seafood City on the occasions when she wanted fresh fish, dried fish, balut, or some other food Filipinos seem to be fond of.
After her military husband got transferred back to the mainland, she found out about a farm that could make them and ship them to her home. Now she can eat all the balut she wants.
My wife, Josie, can eat balut, but she isn't as fond of it, and she won't order it from someone she doesn't know.
Other Delicacies
Some Filipino dishes are excellent, and some aren't good at all. I don't like "bagoong" (fermented fish or shrimp paste), but I've tried "pinakbet" a couple of times, which includes bagoong as a key ingredient. I won't touch "dinuguan" (made with pig blood).
Most of the rice and fruit-based dishes are exceptional, although I can't name them all. I like "halo-halo" and "ginataan" when I want something sweet (which is a rare thing nowadays). Anything made with rice is usually good to go.
I tried a single balut once in 1983, but I couldn't do anything more than drink the "juice" from inside the shell. It wasn't the smell or the taste that kept me from finishing it. It was the thought of what I was eating.
I'm sure I wouldn't have had a problem with it if I hadn't been sober at the time, but I was. From what I remember, most other Americans couldn't eat it while sober back then either.
Balut is something I might voluntarily eat again when I'm starving to death, after an apocalypse or something.
Image by Judgefloro, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons