Here’s another one for the Weird Food Files – it’s Edible Bird’s Nest Soup!
I found out about this rather unusual dish during an entertaining Les Rives trip from Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam to the Mekong Delta! It’s a good trip because you leave the hustle and bustle of the big smoke to chill out a bit in the wide open spaces which I always need for a metropolis detox.
Anyway, we were cruising in a speedboat when all of a sudden, these unusual concrete structures appeared next to the river – and there’s plenty of them:
They looked a bit unusual – literally a number of concrete blocks sticking out in the middle of nowhere.
Here’s a closer view – note the narrow holes that no human could escape from.
There’s good reason for this – these structures are built specifically for the Swiftlet bird which produces a birds nest that is highly valued in Chinese culture. And these avian condominiums are worth a lot of money to the Vietnamese economy.
What happens is that the Swiflet (scientific name: Aerodramus fuciphagus) creates their nest using their own saliva and it forms an unusual shape like this:
These nests are then sent to Hong Kong for sale, of which the vast majority of them end up in mainland China. They cost a staggering $6,600 per kilogram, which is way more than the cat poo coffee I drank in Indonesia.
The reason the birds nests are so expensive is that they supposedly have health benefits when consumed in a soup – such as a rather nice skin complexion. The nests apparently taste salty or briny when cooked up into this brothy substance. And this bowl of expensive soup can set you back around $US100! Hope it tastes good!
Our guide said ‘whether it works or not, it doesn’t matter! Each one of those concrete houses holds 66,000 Swiftlets, and they’re worth 2 million American dollars each year’.
Wow! No wonder these buildings are going up faster than Kim Jong Un’s rockets!
So if you see these tiny birds flying around the Mekong Delta in Vietnam, they’re worth an absolute motza! (that’s Australian slang for ‘fortune’!).
I think I’m going to start building some concrete nesting structures myself!
Sounds like way more money than travel blogging!