YouTuber Uses Supersized Ostrich Egg To Make Soy-Marinated Ramen Egg

The crown jewel in a bowl of ramen is undoubtedly its ajitsuke tamago, the runny-yolked, soft-boiled egg that’s marinated in a dashi and soy sauce concoction.

Chicken eggs are usually used for ramen eggs (check out ramen king Keisuke Takeda's recipe to make the eggs here), but what happens if you use a supersized ostrich egg instead? That’s what food vlogger Grubbing with Guber seeks to find out.

According to Guber, one ostrich egg is equivalent to 24 chicken eggs. A quick Google search reveals that the equivalent number could range from 16 to 30 chicken eggs, depending on the size of the ostrich egg.

“From my research, people recommend 60 minutes for a soft-boiled ostrich egg, whereas you need 90 minutes for a hard-boiled egg,” says Guber, who eventually decides to boil his egg for 70 minutes in a pot with “eight to 12 cups of water”.

After 70 minutes, Guber lifts the ostrich egg out of the pot and shocks it immediately in an ice water bath to stop the egg from cooking. He also chills the egg and water in the fridge for a further 30 minutes to cool it down for cutting.

The ostrich egg’s shell is so hard, you’d need a knife and some force to crack it open. It’s -pretty shiok to watch the ostrich egg being peeled — its extra-hard shell detaches easily from the egg white in large pieces.

The ostrich egg is then immersed in a Ziploc bag containing dashi, soy sauce, bonito and mirin mix that Guber had prepared, and left to marinate for “seven days”.

After a week, Guber lifts the ostrich egg out of the marinade. It is now a dark brown hue, and resembles Taiwan’s famous Tamsui iron eggs, which are repeatedly cooked and air-dried for a firm texture with intense soy flavour.

Guber cautions his audience to cut the egg carefully as “it falls apart easily”. When sliced in half, his ostrich egg turns out to be hard-boiled with sandy yolk. Oops. “I overboiled it a little bit but I was trying to [play] safe,” he admits, recommending people to boil their ostrich eggs for around “50 to 60 minutes” to get a gooey yolk.

As the ostrich egg is so big, the soy marinade also couldn’t penetrate the egg white to get to the yolk. “But the flavour definitely pulled through,” Guber chirps optimistically.

He pairs his ostrich egg with a bowl of ramen, describing its taste as having “a lot more intense yolk taste.” (We have once tried scrambled ostrich egg, and found that it has a yolk that’s a paler yellow compared to a chicken egg, and is strangely much blander than a regular good quality chicken egg). Interesting experiment, though.

Photos: Grubbing with Guber/ YouTube