Eggs. Photo: bella_domanie via www.morguefile.com
Though marketing slogans are often crafted of lies and hyperbole, I must admit that eggs are indeed as incredible as they are edible. Through heating, beating, baking, whisking, steaming, boiling, poaching, or interacting with myriad other ingredients, these palm-sized ovate spheroids prove they are among the great shape-shifters of the culinary world.
Background and agenda
In the eggs class — the second of the back-to-basics series at the Cambridge School of Culinary Arts — we learned about egg safety, egg storage, egg beating, egg-white whipping, poaching, coddling, and hard and soft cooking. Hong, our instructor for the series, presented these eggy topics plus the proper techniques for creating Hollandaise sauce and mayonnaise, two famous and familiar egg-based preparations that in turn form the basis of countless sauces, dressings, toppings, and spreads.
Disappointingly, Hong didn’t show us her preferred methods of cracking open or separating eggs; nor did she whip up any egg whites for us to show us the different stages of beaten whites (soft and stiff peaks, for example) and what they’re used for.
How can you tell an egg is fresh? If you shake the egg and can hear the yolk move, or if you crack it open and the yolk is nice and firm, the egg is fresh. When might you not want to use the freshest eggs possible? When hard boiling them: As an egg ages, the insides dry up little by little and pull away from the shell, making them easier to peel when hard boiled. Of course, other factors influence ease of peeling, such as the temperature of the egg when you peel it, and where on the egg you start peeling.
Budding chefs and eggs
In class, everybody made their own batches of hollandaise and mayonnaise, and various individuals or teams worked on:
- Cheese souffle. To be baked in single-serving ramekins: Butter ramekins and dust with grated parmesan cheese. Make a béchamel sauce. Prepare a souffle base from the béchamel. Pour into prepared ramekins, bake, and serve. “Eat soon.”
- Frittata di cipolle (onion omelet). Heat butter in a skillet then add and sweat some garlic and lots of onions. Add some rosemary, then make sure mixture is spread evenly across the skillet. Beat eggs; pour on top of onion mixture. Cook over low heat until eggs are set but not dry.
- Eggs Benedict. Poach eggs. Cook some Canadian bacon. Toast some English muffins. Assemble Benedicts by stacking, bottom to top, English muffin, bacon, poached egg, hollandaise sauce.
- Quiche. Make pastry dough; roll out and place into pie pan. Make custard of eggs, egg yolks, cream, swiss cheese, and seasonings. Pour over crust; bake 35 to 40 minutes.
- Pipérade and scrambled eggs. Concassé the tomato. Saute onion and garlic in butter, add peppers (mirepoix dice!) and tomato, cook until liquid evaporates “and mixture becomes a thick pulp.” Beat the eggs and add them to a second skillet, prepped with heated butter. Whisk until eggs become creamy; mix in tomato mixture. Spoon into a serving dish on top of garlic croutes (slices of crunchy garlic bread, essentially).
- Crepes. (Gary and I volunteered to make the crepes.) Clarify a lot of butter, cool the butter, then pour into liquid measuring cup. The butter will be used mostly to constantly “oil” the crepe pan, though two tablespoons will go into the crepe batter. Blend together eggs, milk, water, flour, salt, clarified butter. Let batter rest for at least 30 minutes. Heat crepe pan (we used really small pans!). Pour some clarified butter into pan, swirl it around the pan, and pour the excess back into the measuring cup. Tilt buttered pan away from you, add some batter to the lip of the pan, “quickly tilt the pan from side to side so that the entire bottom of the pan is covered with a thin layer of batter.” Cook until browned and lacy and then carefully turn crepe with spatula; brown the other side. Unmold onto plate; continue with rest of batter.We quickly learned that, when making crepes, the turning is the hardest part. Once you erringly fold the crepe onto itself, it’s not easy to unfold it in the pan. And none of our crepes browned evenly. Whether this was a shortcoming of stove, pan, or technique we were unable to ascertain.
Frenzied egg whiskers
Mayonnaise in the making. Photo: FotoosVanRobin; for this mayonnaise, honey mustard was used because the cook doesn't like dijon mustard.
Why buy mayonnaise when it is ridiculously easy to make at home? All mayonnaise requires is egg yolks, mustard, salt, lemon juice or vinegar, vegetable oil, and a few minutes of your time. And, okay, maybe a little bit of whisking restraint.
Whisk together all the ingredients EXCEPT THE OIL, then start whisking in oil teensy bit by teensy bit until a creamy emulsion forms. At this point you can ease your control of the oil a bit, but still, add it slowly — don’t just dump it in. Adjust seasonings; can be thinned a bit by adding a bit of water. (Bit by bit by bit!) It’s fun to watch how egg and oil mixed together slowly becomes a thick creamy liquid, then quickly transforms into a thick, yellowish cream. I had a taste. Mmm. Tastes just like Hellman’s, I thought to myself. That caught me off guard; I corrected myself: Nooo! Hellman’s tastes just like homemade. Despite my fascination with the mayo magic, I have little room for full-fat mayonnaise in my daily, weekly, or even monthly diet. If someone could present me with an easy recipe for low-fat mayonnaise consisting only of fresh, straightforward ingredients — a homemade Hellman’s Light — THAT would be truly magical.
Before this class, I had shied away from making my own mayonnaise in part because I was freaked by the raw egg and that mayonnaise isn’t cooked. No need to fear, I Iearned: the acid (usually the vinegar or lemon juice) “cooks” the egg and prevents bacteria growth. Makes sense, if only in a heartening way. However, it is worth noting that the American Egg Board claims that your average homemade sauce or mayonnaise recipe has nowhere near enough acid to cook the raw eggs effectively. What also befuddles me is Alice Waters’s aioli (garlic mayonnaise) recipe from The Art of Simple Food. Her aioli calls for fresh garlic, salt, an egg yolk, water, and oil. Unless pounded garlic releases acid, there’s nothing in this recipe that would cook the eggs. Then again, the the American Egg Board claims we should always to cook the eggs when a recipe calls for raw, and offers tip on how to do this. Or you can use pasteurized eggs, which are more expensive than nonpasteurized eggs, but other than that there should be no differences.
I was considerably less excited about the Hollandaise sauce, both the making and the tasting, than I was about the mayonnaise. First, the Hollandaise had to be made at the stove, around which a half dozen or more fellow students had already congregated, each trying to constantly whisk and watch their hollandaises, all on separate gas burners. I watched as my comrades disappeared into and then emerged from of the crowd, the ones unable to penetrate the mass stretching their tippie toes and whisk-wielding arms to the extent necessary to reach the back burners. Gary and I waited until the crowd had thinned before approaching the stove to give our own whisking a whirl.
Second, I don’t sauce my food much, at least not with overly creamy or buttery preparations, so I didn’t imagine I would gain much by mastering hollandaise, which is basically just egg yolks and butter. You mix egg yolks with water and lemon juice, heat that mixture until it bubbles around the edges of the pot, then you whisk in a total of one-half cup of butter, piece by piece, until the butter is melted and the sauce is thinkened. Missing from the printed recipe was the “whisk constantly” instruction, which Hong repeated umpteen times, mostly in my general direction. The whisking is necessary, she explained, to incorporate enough air to make the sauce sufficiently thick.
Before I had added all the butter, the souffle team announced that their puffy, cheesy creations were ready for consumption. When one of the souffle’s creators came by to hand me a souffled ramekin, I gestured toward a melting chunk of butter in my sauce and asked him to set the souffle down; I’d enjoy it very soon.
“Eat your souffles NOW!” Hong ordered from across the kitchen, “before they collapse! You can turn the heat off under your hollandaises; they’ll be fine.” Wow. Okay, I shut off the heat under the hollandaise. Stat! The souffles were perfectly cheesy and fluffy; totally worth the, er, nonwait.
For some reason I had believed that making hollandaise — or any “French” sauce — was a super-tricky feat, a belief reinforced by the “how to fix broken hollandaise” discussion in this class’s opening demonstrations. Apparently it’s not so delicate an operation that you cannot temporarily turn off the heat and walk away if an epicurean emergency arises. What is delicate, however, is the hollandaise itself. You have to keep it between 165 and 180 degrees Fahrenheit to kill any bacteria, and you should serve immediately or within two hours. What you don’t use, toss. “It’s easy to make a new batch, and cheap;” said Hong, “much cheaper than going to the hospital.”
For more information on eggs and egg safety
- Playing it Safe with Eggs: What Consumers Need To Know from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration
- Shell Eggs From Farm to Table from the U.S. Department of Agriculture
- Egg Facts from the American Egg Board