Eggs 101

Has anyone ever watched the animated TV series Archer? It was, when we used to watch it anyway, twistedly funny and tragic, with a totally dysfunctional and a little narcissistic protagonist who also is an outright cool spy. Besides innate 007-esque abilities, Archer's second nature is to belittle or berate people. In the show's early seasons Archer screamed on multiple occasions his outrage, "How hard is it to poach a God damn egg properly?! Seriously, it's like eggs 101." That made me spring forward in my seat with my outrage. But that was the comedic mechanism of Archer.

Seriously, who even knows what a perfectly poached egg is, unless you have been served one or know its description. Most of us, okay I, would think the stringy, craggy edges of egg white and a completely off-centered yolk are perfectly acceptable, if that is all we see most often. Not all restaurants serve perfect poached eggs, either. I have in the past been served some with completely runny as well as completely cooked yolks, instead of dreamy soft with a runny center. Suspicious ones exist too. A popular restaurant in the Cuba quarter of Wellington, New Zealand, used to serve poached eggs that were always round but strangely with barely a thin film of white enclosing the yolk. Could that be called a perfect poached egg, when a big part of the egg is missing? Egg white constitutes a whopping 65% of an egg, not counting the shell.^*  Pretty ingenious shortcut - probably just a little stringy bit to trim off, if any, and the rest can go in a pavlova. Of course, I'm only guessing.

Poached egg to me was like a 300-level skill at least, definitely not 101. But, I still prefer the authentic skill to shortcuts.

There are a lot of articles on the Web making an attempt to help us make the perfect poached egg. Most help at least in some way, but this one by Kristen Aiken from The Huffington Post is the best - concise yet thorough in explaining the causes of problems. Following her instructions, I succeeded making the perfect poached egg the first time and consistently thereafter.

My main takeaways from the instructions:
* do not add salt to the water
* vinegar is unnecessary if you do it right
* stir the water to create a whirlpool before sliding the egg in the center of the whirlpool
Do visit Kristen's article for a proper read of her instructions.

The only thing missing in her instructions (and from other people's) is how to determine if an egg is fresh without breaking it first.

Boiled egg is eggs 101, right?


Tip:

How to tell if an egg is fresh without breaking it open?

Eggs come in batches, and if you buy them from supermarkets, they should have a best-before date on the carton or whichever packaging they come in. So, the closer the time is to that date, the older they are. However, from my experience, even the supposed same batch in the same carton often contain mixed degrees of freshness. The trick is to put the egg in a large bowl of water, and use it only if it is lying down on the bottom, NOT floating upright and definitely NOT floating at the top of the water. Apparently, according to Eggcyclopedia a freshly laid egg does not have an air cell - the pocket of air, or space, under the shell that we can see when we peel an egg. The air cell is developed and becomes larger as the egg ages.



* yolk to white proportion information obtained from a study published by Iowa State University:  https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/d8a4/986905f5dd90f62495f6f07b6740a549dd2f.pdf


#eggs  #poachedegg

Loosely Creative

Do you diligently follow recipes? I always faithfully follow a recipe the first time round. To me, it is like having someone else's cooking, it is polite to taste it first to determine if it's really neceesay to reach for the salt shaker. Not everyone has the same taste, obviously. I see a lot of people give their 2 cents on bettering recipes in the comment sections.

I haven't used a recipe in a long while, mainly because I am too lazy. Nowadays, I don't usually plan and shop ahead any more. The kitchen in this tiny apartment has little room for storage, or even elbows during cooking or cleaning up. Besides, there are always things in the fridge and pantry (if it can qualify as such) that should be used up while fresh, but together they don't often never neatly map on to any specific recipe. Unfortunately, when I have to cook, there is usually no spare time for running to the shop.

But there is always an upshot to everything. Improvising led me out of my comfort zone of following recipes.

In Julia Child's The French Chef, episode Elegance with Eggs, she taught more than just fancy ways of cooking eggs - baked eggs and molded eggs. She also talked about how to serve food by combining various things you already know how to make, into a presentation of a new dish. She put cooked spinach mixed with white sauce on a sautéd round cut piece of bread, added a molded egg on top, spooned sauce over it and sprinkled with chopped parsley. And, voila! A brand new dish morphed from the hackneyed Eggs Florentine. She went on to suggest a few more ideas with other dishes to inspire the audience to be creative. So, I feel thoroughly encouraged to make dishes up, even if it is strange.

Use of Juicy Water from Canned Beet

The other day I wondered what to do with the juicy water left from a can of beet - that is, rather than drinking it. I looked for ideas on the Internet but most suggestions were to mix drinks or use it as replacement ingredient for its color. So, I kept thinking...

Then, it came to me, if you can mix 2 teaspoonful of tomato paste into a coconut cream curry, why not beet juice? Crazy experiment ensued. Crimson splatter on the walls, orange hued yellow dust circles overlapping various deep brown ones, grayish white smeary drag tracks across counter top and around the hobs... It could have been an incident that triggers a who-done-it investigation. Nah, I am not that messy a cook, really. Really!

The result was a really nice balance of acidity and sweetness with a piquant accent, yet delicate. It has been nice served with chicken, but I can image that it would be perfect accompaniment to crustaceans. If you would like to try this experiment, may I suggest you first try one measure of beet juice to two measures of coconut cream. Play around, and I am sure you will come up with the ratio that is right for you. Naturally, you will want to take into account of any liquid stock you normally use in your recipe, and substitute with stock powder, instead.

Tips:

A good natural coconut cream or milk, without whitening agent, is often slightly grayish.
There is a really good guide to different coconut milk and cream products and even how they are actually made, on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXzELWHyOAg