All Things Egg

I'm not sure where this thread will go. I love eggs -- as do most people I guess, but I am going to post some of my egg prep, loves, recipes, and experiments here. And feel free to do the same if you wish.

I got this idea yesterday when I read about curing egg yolks in salt and sugar, and that has intrigued me constantly for the last day or so. Also my 10-year-old daughter gobbles up raw quail eggs. I mean, we buy a whole pint of them at the farmers market and she cracks them and sucks them raw out of the shell in no time flat. Crazy -- and awesome.

My current favorite is a sunny-side-up duck egg on buttered toast with hot sauce and horseradish kraut on top. It is soooo good. And those big duck egg yolks are the best. They really are.

And then today I saw some crazy beet pickled hardboiled quail eggs. And they looked good too… Gotta work on that one.

So, as someone who used to watch Jacques Pepin videos with my daughter to instruct her how to make scrambled eggs and different types of omlettes, I thought I would run with this.

Feel free to give me any tips or inspiration -- or post your own egg lovin' or recipes.

k.

Here's miso marinated eggs from my friend Matsuoka-san:

Ingredients:
500g white miso
40g sugar
1.5 Tbsp mirin
Eggs (chicken or duck)
Konbu

Procedure:
Mix miso, sugar & mirin.

Cook eggs @ 150F for 25 minutes, remove and chill in ice bath. (155F for firmer yolks)

Peel eggs and carefully remove egg whites leaving only soft cooked yolks.

Spread 1/2 miso mixture on bottom of container. Place layer of cheesecloth over miso and maker slight indentation to contain yolks. cover yolks with another layer of cheesecloth and spread remaining miso mixture on top. Cover and refrigerate for 2 days.

Julienne rehydrated konbu to decorate yolks to look like tangerine, orange, persimmon or loquat.

Years ago, when I worked in Hungary, towards the end of the period when the Soviet army was much in evidence, we used to go to a lot of restaurants in Budapest that served excellent top notch caviar. It was incredibly cheap. In one of my favourite joints they had a method of serving just the yolks of eggs (duck, quail, hens, and some others that I can't remember) that had somehow been poached whole but without the white albumen. They were warm and runny and unctuous. The technique was to gently place the yolk on the tongue, with a horn spoon full of your caviar of choice and let the yolk break in your mouth over the caviar. This was almost better than sex with the hot young Hungarian dancer I was dating at the time. It created something of an appetite for fertilising her eggs.

i love eggs.

my Taiwanese wife introduced me to a braised soy egg..so good. zero clue as to how they make it..(yet)

me, i HATE 90% of the worlds scrambled eggs. dry and over cooked..some even to the point that moisture is pushed out and pooling. gross.

i love fluffy scrambled eggs cooked just to that point of perfection..just north of almost raw. ironically, it is like a game of "CHICKEN". you face off against the stove heat hoping to pull the eggs just to the point that they can finish cooking on the plate.

eggs, salt, some creme..and maybe an extra yolk in a batch.

years ago, i watched Wolfgang make an omelet. crazy cool, he bumps the pan and the omelet almost folds itself.

boomchakabowwow said:

i love eggs.

my Taiwanese wife introduced me to a braised soy egg..so good. zero clue as to how they make it..(yet)

me, i HATE 90% of the worlds scrambled eggs. dry and over cooked..some even to the point that moisture is pushed out and pooling. gross.

i love fluffy scrambled eggs cooked just to that point of perfection..just north of almost raw. ironically, it is like a game of "CHICKEN". you face off against the stove heat hoping to pull the eggs just to the point that they can finish cooking on the plate.

eggs, salt, some creme..and maybe an extra yolk in a batch.

years ago, i watched Wolfgang make an omelet. crazy cool, he bumps the pan and the omelet almost folds itself.

Click to expand...

I prefer my eggs a little more done than this, but I saw Michael Symon cook eggs your way the other day. He used a sauce pan and continually stirred, it took about 1 minute. Made something hard look like amateur work. I am going to try it this weekend.

Wasn't there an egg scene in 'Tampopo' that showed an interesting way of sharing an egg? :O Other than that, I really like poached eggs but suck at making them. Also still have not experimented with sous vide eggs, but that is on the list, as is the cured egg yolk. Oh, and I never ate any eggs other than chicken or quail, so I have to find out about duck eggs, me thinks.

I have to admit that I am more hesitant to use eggs in Hawaii than I was in Europe where I got eggs at the farmers market , and I knew they were at most a week old. With the lenient laws on what constitutes a 'fresh' egg in the US and no good farm source for fresh eggs, some of my favorite things like a mousse au chocolat seem more risky to make. And it's probably even more the image of eating a several month old raw old egg than fear of salmonella etc. that's aversive to me.

Stefan

You may have seen my farmer's eggs on my FB page. Muscovy and goose.

Shame is, I can't use them.

apicius9 said:

Also still have not experimented with sous vide eggs, but that is on the list, as is the cured egg yolk. Oh, and I never ate any eggs other than chicken or quail, so I have to find out about duck eggs, me thinks…
Stefan

Click to expand...

I do all my hard-boiled eggs with an immersion circulator now and use the chef steps egg calculator to fine tune how I like them done.

http://www.chefsteps.com/activities/the-egg-calculator

k.

Must watch
[video=youtube;_W58awrJBHo]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_W58awrJBHo[/video]

those are some nice cocks there

This morning, I tried a Taiwanese style fried omelette after seeing the technique in a short sriracha docu. Very good and sure goes well with a bunch of sriracha.

These days, I am spending my free time off work trying to get better at cooking eggs, notably classic tamagoyaki and omelets in the style of Motoyoshi-san's from Kichi Kichi in Kyoto. The latter being a difficult and frustrating learning experience, I must say.

JMJones said:

This morning, I tried a Taiwanese style fried omelette after seeing the technique in a short sriracha docu. Very good and sure goes well with a bunch of sriracha.

Click to expand...

the oyster omelet?

This last weekend I was lazy and looked up this recipe. I cut it in half and put it on a quarter sheet instead. I also used arugula instead of spinach. In the end it was rather bland and I put hot sauce and sour cream on it. There are some benefits to making it this way on a pan when feeding a family, but for the most part one loses too much control of the egg by putting it in the oven IMO. In a fry pan you can directly monitor doneness -- the oven less so. I'll pass on this in the future, unless I make two half-sheet pans for a family gathering just to feed an army.

k.

Btw, my eldest daughter mentioned seeing this last week. It's this gadget that scrambles eggs in its shell. I saw it a year or so ago when it was a Kickstarter campaign, but forgot about it. Frankly, I think this is the stupidest gadget on the planet. Instead of cracking the eggs and whisking them by hand, these 'kickstarters' have created a completely useless novelty gadget to make an easy and relatively quick task into a long and complicated one. Gotta love gadget mania in the US.

[video=youtube;PoIxtFBhh5k]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PoIxtFBhh5k#t=155[/video]

k.

You can do that with a stocking. The idea is that you hard boil it and get a mixed yolk and white together.

Dardeau said:

You can do that with a stocking. The idea is that you hard boil it and get a mixed yolk and white together.

Click to expand...

Yeah, I understand that that is the most logical use for it, but the video shows them scrabbling the egg with the gadget and then dumping the raw egg into a pan to cook. That didn't make sense to me. And outside of that one unique application: a hard-boiled scrambled egg, it seems as if there really isn't a use for it. Has anyone done this? Does the scrambled hard-boiled egg taste that different? Better? Unique?

Maybe I should try it with a sock.

k.

It's an interesting texture, very easy to overcook. Maybe circulator?

Mr dinky..that sheet pan thing looks pretty good!!

my friend does something similar. he gets the sheet pan rocket hot first, then puts the egg mix in..like a big flat frittata. i liked it, but i agree it can be kinda bland. his was, like it could take a lot of salt or something.

My favorite eggs are shirred. And yes, Pepin is the egg master!

Le Maitre:

[video=youtube;u8QIDHla6iA]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8QIDHla6iA[/video]

:cool2:

The Egg. It elevated this grilled take on Panzanella from the "good" file to the "Make her panties fall off" file.

Nice Dave! Just watched the Pepin episode, he always makes it look so easy and is a joy to watch. Gotta go and buy some eggs today.

Stefan

That looks so tasty Dave. And I can't let my wife see it or that's what she will want for dinner.

And just because, here is Jacques making his omelets.

k.

[video=youtube;s10etP1p2bU]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s10etP1p2bU[/video]

holy crap..he is good!! i never tire of watching that man..especially when he turns big pieces of garlic into small pieces of garlic.

Wolfgang does something similar..with the tapping on his wrist to flip the eggs up the edge.

[video=youtube;gV_-87XihOQ]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gV_-87XihOQ[/video]

I've eaten eggs almost everyday and cooked them for the past 10 years. I still have a long way to go. Eggs are eggs really, to me I can only taste (and only slightly) (and would probably fail a blind test) the difference between free range and regular and that's probably because the free range yada yada yada, comes fresher from the animal. But if you cook/scramble duck or goose, chicken or quail I can't tell the taste apart. I haven't even noticed a difference in the cooking of it. Maybe I'm just egg blind or like the taste to generally. I just buy free range for the ethics and hope that it is better for my health.

I saw on cooking issues, pressure cooking hard boiled for 45 min. Ice bath and peel. The eggs come brown, real nutty flavor. Delicious dark twist on a hard boiled.

I did an egg salad sandwich with lox, c.cheese and chives.

But I mixed the cream cheese with the egg yokes and lemon juice to make the egg binder.

Something I've been doing for some time now is whisk in with the eggs about 1/8th cup of manchego cheese per egg (eye balled not packed in the least) and cook the omelet as per usual. Now I've tried many cheeses and with eggs I've found water context is an extremely crucial variable. Manchego manchego manchego. It's right in the middle of hard and soft, not to stringy, fry's well, and is not overpowering. Light enough to give lift and stiff enough to hold. But like wine now it's up to your personal preference. I like my omelets just a tinge more fully cooked than a souffle just really fluffy letting the egg finish on the plate. I don't do a lot of homework on who does what but the cheese mixed in vs sandwiched. Dance-worthy delish. And I call them D'eggs (smoked Gouda is not bad but if only I can get my hands on a smoked manchego)

don't stir the omelet unless you're using a non stick.

I think things like tomatoes or spinach is disgusting because they always sweat after, and is watery.

Mix the mayo, mustard and cooked egg yokes then add it to the eggs whites for egg salad. Also I like to used finely diced bell peppers and a dashed of smoked paprika.