Salting eggs in brine is a way of preserving eggs, Thailand is very hot and eggs could only be kept for a short time unless salted. As with many cultures, the Thai's acquired a taste for the salted product, and created recipes around it. It's common in Thailand to east rice soup with salty egg, the egg adds the salty taste to the dish! The salt concentrates in the yolk of the egg, the longer they are kept in the brine, the saltier they get, 14-20 days is best, if you leave the eggs too long in the brine, they will be too salty to eat. If you're unsure how salty they are, remove one, boil it and taste it.

Sardines are a common ingredient in Thai cooking. Normally we eat them fresh rather than tinner, they are steamed, grilled or deep fried.

When I was a child we would catch river fish and barbecue them over a charcoal fire. If we were lucky, when the fish was opened it would have eggs, and I would eat the delicious barbecued roe.

Duck eggs are slightly larger than chicken eggs and are often used to make salty eggs, because they have a bigger yolk. They are also used in Thai cooking to make 'Kanom' (snacks and sweets) because they have less of a sulfurous smell than chicken eggs.

These small crabs are only about 5cms across. We use these tiny crabs a lot in Thai cuisine, unlike larger crabs you cannot crack them open and eat the meat because they're just too small. Instead they are eaten whole, including the shells.

This is 'Mu Yong', literally frizzy pork, also known as pork hair, or pork fibers. You may have seen it in the snacks section of Asian grocers and wondered whether it's food or for scrubbing plates clean!

These dried tiny shrimp are used to add a strong shrimp taste to dishes. If you imagine all the flavour of a large prawn concentrated into a tiny package, thats the flavour these have.

You can buy these either frozen, or more commonly dried in the sunshine and fried with a little garlic or sauce. They are also used to add crunchiness to Tom Yum soup.

Above you can see the drying process, I place them out in the hot sun for 1-2 days and the sun-drying process concentrates the flavours.

In this photograph you can see the deep fried baby squid. They can be eaten like this with rice, or added to soups or noodle dishes to add a fish taste and crunch.

This, pretty gruesome, jar is the result of a day spent beach combing. Those are tiny crabs we use in papaya salads, we crush them into the salad and they form a seafood sauce that flavours the salad. In cases like this, when I've collected too many to use immediately, I preserve them like this in fish sauce. The saltiness of the sauce will keep them for months.

I don't quite know what this is. In Thai we call it fish or even star fish but I believe it's dried squid. It has a salty flavour that makes it perfect to use as a salty crunch on salads.

Mangda are large insects about 8 cms long, that live in rice fields in Northern Thailand. During the evening they fly around lights and are easily netted and eaten. Mang-da is also the name given to boyfriends who live off their girlfriends. They get the name because they flit from light to light. Similar to the English phrase 'bar-fly'. Someone is said to be a mang-da if their girlfriends work and they don't.
They're really difficult to photograph, I had to include some leaves in the photo to get them to calm down, so forgive the rather badly composed photograph.

Uses
They're are pounded and used as a popular flavouring in many dishes, a very common Thai ingredient is Mang-da flavour Nam Prik (spicy chilli paste used to add flavour and spice to dishes). You can even get this is from Asian grocers, look for Mang-da flavoured chilli pastes.
They are also dry fried or grilled and eaten as is, removing the shell and legs.

They say the Chinese eat every part of the pig except for the squeek. The Thai's are the same, we eat almost everything from almost every animal! Lets start with the head, it's steamed and cooked with spices like cinnamon and star anise to make soft fatty pork in soup.

The blood is left to congeal in a pot (above is chunks of congealed pigs blood), then sliced and added to glass noodle soup, and other forms of soup.

These lungs are cooked until almost dissolved into the water, and again used for soups and noodles.

Pigs intestines are cleaned carefully, boiled until soft, then sliced and made into a salad, or fried, or sliced thin for dipping into chilli sauce.

Liver is used in lap-mu, or sliced and fried, or used as in suki yaki, or even barbecued.

These tongues are nice barbecued (grilled), till browned on the outside, then sliced thinly and eaten with a spicy sauce as a gop-gam dish (a snack to eat with alcoholic drinks).

We have many types of delicious beetles in Thailand, here are just 2! Since I'm in Isaan, I'm going to introduce you to the various farmers foods that are eaten here. I know that you'll never make them at home, but if you're in Thailand, given them a try, you might find out that you like them. I was introduced to them as a child by my father, so I don't have the revulsion to them that westerners are taught, but then I have a revulsion to beef.

The winged insects are eaten minus the wings and legs. When you buy them in the market, they're dry fried in a pan with salt and pepper to cook them so you don't need to cook them yourself. They're nice with Maggi sauce.

Oh, one last thing, don't let the fact they live on old buffalo dung put you off...

I don't expect you to make this recipe, but it's interesting to see other cultures food. This is fish, mixed with rice, and left for 2 weeks till it goes sour, as vinegars form from the rice. We then eat it raw or fried. It's not really raw, it's more like the fish is cooked by the pickling process, but for western stomachs it's probably better to cook it, less risky.

I've used Bla-Kassob here, I couldn't find the name in English, from the pictures it looks like a type of carp, the Thai name is ปลากระสูบ , but you can use any fish with scales, and firm flesh.

When a chicken is butchered for meat, the egg sacks sometimes contain partially formed eggs. The shell hasn't formed yet, and the egg white hasn't been made, but they do have the membrane that keeps the egg together. They are mainly yolk, but the flavour is less sulfurous than a regular yolk. You've probably eaten these only in processed food, but you can sometimes get them from butchers who specialize in chicken.

This dish is seasoned minced pork. When you want to add meat to a soup or noodle dish, you can take spoonfuls of the pork and drop them into the noodle mix to cook. It is not suitable for freezing, it needs to be prepared fresh and its main use is for the Suki-Yaki recipe in the 'Main Courses' section.

These are cooked rotten eggs, the eggs have a strong sulfurous smell and rich flavour. If you get use to the smell then you can eat these for their flavour (and texture, then tend to be spongy due to gas bubbles that get trapped when cooked).
Usually sold already cooked (steamed) to halt the rotting process at the right stage.

Century? Thousand years old? More like 90 day old preserved eggs. These eggs are used as a garnish or ingredient, or just eaten cooked. They are eggs preserved in sodium carbonate and clay, a chemical reaction causes the colour change. The taste is very similar to an unpreserved egg, but the colours and look make them a spectacular show food.

I feel really sorry for these crickets (grass hoppers/locusts). I'm Buddhist and we believe that if you kill animals to eat it is good, but to kill animals otherwise is bad.
The reason I feel sorry for these crickets, is that crickets and bugs in general sold in Bangkok aren't sold mainly to Thais, but to tourists. Eating bugs in Thailand has become a sort of right-of-passage for western teenage tourists to prove how manly and world-wise they are - bad in Buddhism.
Not a food with a crunchy texture eaten by farmers as a cheap source of protein and to get rid of pests, which is good in Buddhism.

I don't want to eat these, and I refuse to buy food if I won't eat it, so forgive the photo taken straight off the street stall. These are foetus eggs, fertilized chicken or more often ducks eggs sold boiled and eaten for 'fertility'. Like shark fin soup another ridiculous food with a fictional claim, yet still today they are eaten. If you're offended, don't click the 'read more' link, because it shows and egg in a later stage.
If you want to try rotten boiled eggs (which I recommend - they are delicious), watch out for these eggs, they are usually sold side by side.

Mussels are farmed in the Gulf of Thailand and are a popular seafood here. Gulf of Thailand mussels are a beautiful turquoise green colour , and it's common to buy them sun-dried rather than fresh. As fresh, they die quickly in the heat and decay, but as dried they can be kept for a long time without special storage. Below I'll explain how to clean them, store them, open them ready for sun-drying.

The classic eating crabs. Seafood is fresh is Thailand and popular, we normally barbecue the crab and pick them apart to eat, but for some dishes you need to prep the crab by removing the meat and any egg roe it has.
Male crabs have more meat in the body, female crabs have less meat, but also have red egg roe, which is a more concentrated crab flavor.

(See after the break for how to determine the sex of a crab and how to prep it).

I've made salted eggs before, normally using the brine technique. That involves soaking them in saturated brine, and letting them absorb the salt.
But there's a second kind of salted egg, the dry salting. That's salted in the salt and white clay, with soot, ashes and charcoal powder to dry them out. The result is a firmer egg yolk than the wet method, but the strong salt flavor remains, the end flavors are the same.

Since Songkran is coming, and white clay is sold everywhere, (it's used to powder the faces of people, a more polite alternative to spraying them with water), I thought now would be a good time to make some dry salty eggs with them.

I'm also going to be making salty egg sweet pies, a tradition for this time of year, and so I'll need some salty eggs for this.