Egg-citing Cuisine

Last night, Sir and I spent almost two hours cooking four eggs for dinner.

It was quite the production and at times bordered on the hilarious, if not the hysterical. The project involved many pots and pans, two sets of eyes, four hands, and nerves of steel - and for that we have to thank Modernist Cuisine, which (if its chapter on eggs is anything to go by) never makes do with two or three easy steps when ten complicated ones will do.

We had a ball.

Here's how we made Egg Blossoms a la Nathan Myhrvold et al.

We assembled our mis en place (we added another egg later on).
The blue-flowered Japanese rice bowl contained melted duck fat.

We heated up a big pot of water to 85 deg C and watched it like a hawk.



We lined small glass prep bowls with heat-resistant plastic wrap.



We brushed the wrap with an olive oil/duck fat mixture,
at a ratio of approximately 1:2.



We broke a room temperature chicken egg
into each bowl and added more fat and salt on top. 

We gathered up the wrap to make a ball, being careful that
the yolk was fully enclosed in albumen.
We tied off the parcel to make a neat spheroid.

We placed the eggs into the simmering water and attempted
to leave them there for exactly twelve minutes.

Keeping the water at the correct temperature (even in such a large pot)
proved to be quite a challenge,
especially as the egg parcels tended to bob and float.
While I held them down with two wooden spoons,
stirring occasionally to keep the water moving,
Sir watched the thermometer and twizzled the
cooker knobs to keep the apparatus at optimum simmering conditions.

We subsequently engineered a setup whereby the eggs were weighted with
a spoon, thus freeing up two hands and one pair of eyes for
temperature control duty. Cutting off the excess plastic wrap
simplified things considerably.

When time was up, we carefully removed the eggs from the pot
and sliced their wrappings open with a pair of scissors.

The result was the Cutest Egg in the World,
which looked like a perfect little Chinese dumpling.

Here's an aerial view of the CEitW.
Note its little folds and anfractuosities!

In the interest of full disclosure, I am bound to admit that none of the eggs was cooked perfectly. The first two were a shade overdone (the yolk slightly set rather than oozy and runny) because we left the eggs in the pot for two extra minutes (getting them out of the water proved to be a task for which we were woefully under-prepared). We cut the timing of the next egg to eleven minutes, which proved inadequate. We had every intention of cooking the fourth egg for twelve minutes exactly, but somehow we accidentally sabotoged this specimen by allowing the temperature to creep up briefly to 88 deg C, thus rendering useless our careful timing.

Nonetheless, the eggs were creamy and tasty, with an utterly consistent custard-texture all the way through. The whites were fluffy but firm - and not at all rubbery. The eggs didn't drip water the way inexpertly poached ones sometimes do and tasted pleasingly of the fat in which they were bathed.

Sir and I agreed their dim-sum-like appearance was witty and fun.

We enjoyed our eggs thoroughly as part of a light Sunday supper. Sir arranged his next to a leftover piece of poached salmon and I perched mine atop a golden disk of polenta. As we munched away, we considered whether the Blossoms might be a bit too involved to serve to company, requiring as they do twelve minutes of uninterrupted concentration on the cook's part. Of course, if the victims - sorry, I mean guests - in question are particulary good sports, the cooking of their appetizer could be part of the show. They might even be encouraged to participate, particularly if they are of a scientific turn of mind.

Naturally, with an immersion circulator the job would be made much more straightforward and foolproof. All I need to build one are an immersion heater, an aquarium pump, a thermocouple, a temperature controller, a solid state relay, and a variety of easy-to-find bits and bobs (rocker switch, sheets of acrylic, silicon caulking, a soldering iron), many of which may be scrounged from my workplace's extensive knick-knack collection.

The Kid Squid has volunteered to be the project's Chief Engineer and I am tempted to take him up on the offer.

Although in saner moments, I think it seems like a lot of trouble for simmered eggs.

Even done the Modern Way.