the emblem of the land I love

What says Fourth of July weekend more than hamburgers, right? Or Canada Day, I guess. Whatever lights your Roman candle.

There's this trick with eggs. Sometimes I think a major purpose of this blog is to tell you interesting things about eggs. Separate the egg, put the yolk in a clean container, and freeze it. Don't just get it cold - you want it all the way froze. Thaw it.


The yolk is now thickened. It's hard to demonstrate this in a still photograph, I suppose. This only took a few hours for me - I have a new refrigerator and I keep the freezer fairly cold. Plan for overnight, to be safe.


This demonstrates the texture a bit better. That may look like Kraft macaroni and cheese sauce, but it's just egg yolk thickened by freezing and thawing. On the other slice of bread I have some pepperoni cooked to a crisp.

Add a little ketchup, a little sriracha, a Pat La Frieda burger, and some Kool Aid watermelon rind pickles ...

eggs

There are as many ways to combine eggs and curry as there are ways to cook eggs. One of the best breakfasts, especially after a night of drinking or a morning of sleeping in, is eggs scrambled with Thai curry paste - maybe some onions, maybe some leftover fish. Indian curries can be made with hard-boiled eggs, poached eggs, omelettes, you name it.

But this is the way I've been doing it.

You start with eggs as near to room temperature as possible - if I forget or don't have time to take them out of the refrigerator in advance, I sit them in a bowl of very warm water for 15-20 minutes to bring their temp up. This helps keep the eggs from cracking.

Bring a pot of water to boil. Have a tray of ice cubes handy.

Put the eggs in the boiling water and boil them for five minutes. Remove from the water and immediately put them in ice water. Leave them there! For a while. Twenty minutes. An hour. Longer if you like. Eggs retain heat for a surprisingly long time. The other day I was making these eggs, took one out of the ice water after a few minutes, and felt it warm back up in my hand in a few seconds.

If you boil them for six or seven minutes instead of five, you get the unctuous egg - with a yellow yolk that looks nearly boiled but is creamy instead of grainy, terrific for eating whole, not very good for egg salad, all wrong for deviled eggs. At five minutes, you get something like a soft-boiled egg with a hard-boiled white.

Leave them in the shell as long as you like. Once they're out of the shell, the shape warps easily - sit them on a plate and you end up with flat eggs after a bit.

When the curry is ready - the sauce is cooked, the rice is cooked, any other ingredients are ready - take the eggs out of the shell if you haven't already, and add them to some hot butter, ghee, oil, or coconut fat, rolling around a few times until the outside of the egg is golden and blistered like the outer edges of a fried egg's diaspora. This also warms the egg through if you've had them in the fridge after their boiling.

In this case, the egg is served over rice and leftover malai kofta sauce, with mushrooms and curry leaves.

oh ee oh ee oh

The other thing you can do with transglutaminase is make meat-based ravioli.  You heard me.

I took two paper-thin slices of bresaola (Italian air-cured beef) and bonded them together around an egg yolk, before simmering it just long enough to slightly cook it.

Because the bresaola isn't cured with nitrates, it doesn't stay red after cooking -- so the presentation isn't as nice as I expected.  The pasta is dressed lightly with a couple drops of olive oil and Gegenbauer red pepper vinegar, but we'll talk about the vinegar in the vinegar post later.

Functionally, this worked very well.  It's fussy: this "glue" is a powder, after all, not Elmer's glue, so getting two thin sheets of cured meat to bond together at the edges enough to be reasonably water-tight took some careful doing.  Initially there's nothing to make them stick.  You just have to be careful.

Taste-wise, the pasta itself is just great.  Italian cuisine uses egg yolks to dress things fairly often, whether it's a poached egg broken open on vegetables, egg yolk ravioli like this, or an egg baked on top of a pizza.  

But the bresaola wasn't the ideal choice here.  It happened to be the one meat I had in the house that would make this dish possible, but it's not suited to simmering -- it loses its delicate flavor and texture, and there's nothing especially interesting about Very Thin Beef, which is what you end up with.  This would be better made with a different meat -- salami? ham? duck? -- or a different cooking method.  Frying the raviolo seems risky because of the agitation, and I've never fried bresaola so I don't know what that would do to the texture -- but it seems worth trying.  If not, maybe you could do "bacon and eggs" ravioli, encasing an egg yolk in bacon and then frying it -- I just think it would be tricky to fry the bacon to the point of crispiness without hard-cooking the egg.

Of course, there is another way to go with this "egg inside meat" idea, too: if you freeze whole, uncooked egg yolks, they will gradually change in texture, and remain thickened and gelatinous instead of runny once they've thawed.  You could freeze-treat small egg yolks to bring them to that point, and then wrap bresaola or another thin cured meat around each yolk (perhaps with a thin schmear of soft cheese, or some puree of spicy pepper, or a piece of pickled onion), and bond it overnight.  Bring them to room temperature and serve -- no cooking, though I suppose if you didn't want to serve them as finger food, you could sauce them with a warm sauce just before service.

just like that film with michael caine

It's autumn. I mean full-on no shit could snow any fucking second now autumn.  Yesterday I picked up Northern Spy apples, big and heavy and crunchy.  Parsnips.  Turnips.  Rutabagas.  And celery root.

Celery root is a bitch.

It's dirty -- filthy, really -- from all the nooks and crannies of the outside.  It's woody, and peeling alone won't take care of that.  Maybe there are differences in freshness, I don't know, but every time, I under-peel, and I end up with a couple bits of celery root that are just too woody to eat.

But it tastes great.  The celeriac (celery root) salt that I make from Fergus Henderson's recipe in Nose to Tail is amazing -- you basically just shred the celery root, mix it with salt, bake it until dry, and break it back up, but the taste is so deep and ... in a weird celery way ... very complex.  

My favorite thing to do with any celery salt is to put it on a boiled egg with hot sauce.  So for dinner last night, I took those tastes and threw them around each other: I peeled, chopped, and simmered celery root until soft, put it in a cast-iron pan with a little bacon fat, a little pork stock, and some Texas Pete hot sauce and roasted it until the celery root had soaked up the stock and turned crispy (this is a good technique for all your root vegetables), made some of those unctuous eggs, and garnished with Marx Foods Himalayan pink salt and Hawaiian black sea salt.  The crunch of both those salts is perfect for eggs in particular, but the Himalayan pink salt, a mined rock salt, was the winner here -- it has a little minerality to it that I really dig.  That and the green chile salt are my favorites so far, of these free salts.

from my head down to my legs

So those eggs.

Eggs are a good example of why I say to get to know your ingredients.  When you take the rote approach to cooking, just memorizing different methods, you don't really know what you're doing.  You're Berlitzing it, reciting phrases.  You know what you're saying, you know the meaning is getting across, but you don't apprehend the structures and grammar.

Everyone knows how to hard-boil an egg, most people know how to soft-boil an egg.  Everyone's got different tricks, you know, whether you start the eggs in the water before heating it, whether you let them cool in the water, how to peel the eggs, all that.  The thing to keep in mind is how sensitive eggs are to temperature, and how much the texture will differ between an egg cooked at a hard boil for thirty minutes and an egg simmered for 15.

These eggs, what I call unctuous eggs, similar to hot spring eggs, are neither hard- nor soft-boiled.  They never come out exactly the same, because there are too many variables and my kitchen is not a laboratory of controlled conditions.  But the idea is that the white comes out set but not rubbery -- nor even as solid as that of a nice hard-boiled egg -- and that the yolk remains unctuous.  It's not liquid like a soft-boiled egg.  But it has none of the chalkiness of a hard-set yolk, and may in some cases -- we hope for these -- remain orange and custardy.  This is not a hard-boiled egg.  This is not a soft-boiled egg.  This is some other egg.

You bring the egg up to room temp, or let it sit in warm water a while.  You bring your pot of water to a simmer.  You put the egg in the water for 6-8 minutes and then immediately plunge it into ice water, for the same reason you do with blanched vegetables: you don't just want to remove it from the cooking environment, you want to halt the cooking.  Otherwise that egg's going to retain heat and keep cooking the yolk.  Once the egg has cooled down, you can peel it, and you can marinate the thing if you like -- soy sauce is good, hot sauce is good, in either case I'd dilute some with water.  Eggs can suck up a lot of marinade, as you know if you've ever et a pickled one.  I didn't marinate my eggs because I don't want the marinade to clash with my lima beans.

You really can't tell from looking at these how custardy and unctuous the eggs are, particularly the yolks.  A minute less of cooking and they might have been too soft; thirty seconds less would probably be just right to keep the yolks completely orange with none of that canary yellow.  With the eggs, I'm having a lima bean salad, which is just cooked limas marinated with pecan oil -- nut oils in general are terrific for this kind of thing -- with smoked paprika, salt, sage, and a little homemade pepper vinegar.  It's best at room temperature or slightly warm -- I microwaved it a bit, because it's cold lately and room temperature's not what it could be.

On the eggs: Hawaiian pink sea salt, and more of the green chile salt.  The Hawaiian pink sea salt is nice and crunchy -- maybe the sort of thing you'd usually have with French fries instead of egg, but I dig it here.