Hello!
Since I’ve run the ‘How to eat alone’ project, I’ve been continuously banging on about a group of foods that I like to call ‘the solo cook’s friends.’ These are primarily a gang of carbohydrates (sandwiches, rice, pasta etc…) but there is another single person’s pal that I haven’t really spoken about much on the podcast - the most loveable egg, a true and reliable buddy of the solo chef.
I think I may eat an egg every other day. They are just so blimmin’ versatile; they can be breakfast, they can be lunch, they can be dinner. Eggs are easy peasy to make, are yummy in most iterations and are also very good for us. So, I have been wanting to talk about them on this podcast for a really long time and finally, a couple of months ago reached out to someone who I thought would be perfect to discuss them with — Bettina Makalintal, food writer and, let’s call her an ‘eggfluencer.’
I came across Bettina’s work deep in the midst of the pandemic, when I began to follow her marv instagram @crispyegg420, dedicated to beautifully shot plates of food she was rustling up in her Brooklyn home for herself and her partner. Though Bettina wasn’t cooking in complete isolation, I felt like all her meals translated really well to meals for solo cooks like me. And in these meals, the king of all eggs, the crispy egg, featured heavily (hence her eggfluencer status).
In Episode 14, EGGS ARE OUR FRIENDS, we look at the delightfulness of eggs and why they are such a theatrical zeitgeist in our social media obsessed world. Plus we cover the future of the egg in the face of the climate crisis. I would like to say thank you very much to Bettina for humouring me when I asked her for 20 minutes of her time to discuss crispy eggs with me. As some egg-stra curricular reading, I would like to share some of her work (she writes about many, many things and not just eggs but I thought it would be appropriate to share these egg-related morsels that I enjoyed very much.)
- The Science of The Squeezable Poppable Vegan Egg Yolk, Munchies
- Anything Can Be Breakfast with Bettina Makalintal, Lecker Podcast
- Five Ways To Cook An Egg, Syllabus Project
I will soon post a recipe to sit alongside this podcast episode for a very extra chicken cutlet, topped with a crispy egg as discussed with Bettina. I will also publish a guide to making the perfect crispy egg shortly.
Thanks for listening! Below is the episode transcript, which is extremely long and you absolutely do not have to read it:
Transcript for Episode 14, ‘Eggs Are Our Friends’ with Bettina Makalintal (Food & Culture Writer/Eggfluencer). Interview with Bettina Makalintal by Julia Georgallis
JG
Hi, welcome back to the How to eat alone podcast, with me, Julia Georgallis. I’m a baker and I write about food. This podcast discusses issues surrounding loneliness, solitude and solo dining. In it, I talk to different people about various aspects of being and eating alone or doing something by yourself. Every episode comes with a recipe based on a meal that we’ve discussed during the show and each of these recipes are designed to be cooked and eaten by one person and one person only, because most recipes are written for two or more people, which is a bit annoying if you’re cooking by yourself. The idea is that you can cook along whilst you listen to this podcast if you are eating alone. Think of this podcast as your dining buddy
Since I’ve run the How to eat alone project, I’ve found that there are groups of food that keep popping up that I call ‘the solo cook’s friends,’ I’ve mentioned these many many times before in maybe every episode, I dunno. So sorry that I keep banging on about them, but they’re important for us solo chefs. This group, the solo cook’s friends, primarily are a gang of carbohydrate-related snacks - so it’s sandwiches, pancakes, rice dishes, noodle dishes, pasta dishes. These things are cheap, you can find them in every supermarket, every corner shop, they’re easy and quick to cook, they give us lots of energy and and from a kind of emotional perspective ultimately they’re sugars so they make us feel good. But there is another single person’s pal that I haven’t really spoken about yet on this podcast, it’s featured in a couple of blog posts that I’ve written on the Substack page but I haven’t actually discussed it in the podcast - and that is the egg! Now it’s a big statement but I would say that eggs have kept me alive over the last few years of cooking for myself. I think I may eat an egg every other day and there are just so many ways to cook them - Eggs can be breakfast, eggs can be lunch eggs can be dinner, they’re very versatile and they are also a complete protein and contain all of the amino acids that your body needs, so they’re really really good for you. I’ve been wanting to talk about eggs on this podcast for a long time and I finally reached out to someone who I thought would be perfect to discuss them with.
Bettina Makalintal is a food writer born in the Phillipines, raised in Philadelphia and based in New York and in her own words she is also an eggfluencer. She runs food instagram account crispyegg420 which features a lot of lipsmackingly delicious looking dishes, all photograpH in a beautiful and simple way. Many of the dishes she posts feature the king of the egg, the crispy egg. Crispy eggs are a sunny side up, fried egg cooked on a really high heat so that the edges of the white form a kind of papery crispy edge and they’re a staple in South East Asian cooking. Just how this podcast started during the pandemic, Bettina also started cooking every day during Covid, immortalising her meals via instagram and although she is not cooking for herself, because she does also cook for her partner as well her dishes have been inspiring for me actually, I think their format and the way she cooks and uses ingredients translate really well to if you’re cooking alone. I recently heard her on one of my favourite podcasts, Lecker, speaking about how ‘an egg is an easy thing to rely on’ and I just had to reach out to her and ask her if she wanted to spend 20 minutes chatting about eggs with me. To my delight she said yes!
JG:
Thankyou so much for being on my podcast, it’s lovely to talk to you. Probably a great place to start would be to tell me about who you are and what you do.
BM:
Yeah totally, so I’m Bettina Makalintal, I’m a food writer, I currently work at Eater but before that I worked at Bon Appetite and I worked at Munchies so I’ve jumped around food media a little bit, I’m really interested in all the ways that we, like, interact and relate to food. So I am really into restaurant trends but also online food trends and how social media is changing food. I’m also very interested in cooking and what the home cooking space looks like and how cookbooks are changing so I’m just very interested in food in all ways so I just sort of gravitate to what I’m interested in at the moment. I also just cook a lot personally.
JG
Yeah I can see that from your socials - it’s every day, right that you’re cooking and putting stuff out?
BM
Yeah, basically it’s most meals.
JG
I mean we all take photos of our meals, it’s kind of the way we eat, it’s part of the way we eat
BM
Yeah totally, I mean I didn’t used to take pictures of my food but I found it actually quite nice to start with that practice, it feels like much more of an exciting process for me, that I’m sort of documenting everything I’m doing and I like being able to look at it again for inspiration.
JG
I think I also never used to until the pandemic and because I was cooking more for myself, I was also taking photos of my food more and it does change the experience.
And the reason I asked you on my podcast, is because like I said earlier, is because I’ve been wanting to talk about eggs for ages (haha) because eggs, to me, are such a… I always describe them as the single person’s friend but they’re kind of everyone’s friend you don’t have to be a single cook to to be cooking with eggs but you’ve kind of become synonymous I suppose with eggs.
BM
Yeah, I’m an eggfluencer if you will.
(They laugh)
JG
Yeah well I guess you are THE eggfluencer - your handle on insta is crispyegg420, can we talk about crispy eggs, why crispy eggs?
BM
So I think it was very much in the throes of the early pandemic, and so I was seeing all these people making these cooking accounts and I felt very inspired to do the same and I was like ‘what am I cooking a lot of?’ It’s hard to brand yourself as something new and so it was like, ok, whatever I eat a lot of and it just happened to be - I thought of crispy eggs because I feel like that is my go to egg preparation and at the start of the pandemic I was making them all the time so it felt like ‘ok, this is like a brand I can stick to’ it turns out I’m doing all this cooking so I want to immortalise it in some way. But I do think the crispy egg is like my go to - sometimes scrambled eggs give me the ick if you will and poached eggs are a little fussy but a sunny side up egg is the one where I’m like, ok, this is always good. I also feel like a crispy egg is one of those like ‘if you know you know’ things - it’s the way I grew up eating eggs. In a lot of sort of Southeast Asian cuisines, for example, it’s always a crispy egg it’s not just like a silky sunny side up egg, for some people it’s kind of unfamiliar but also it feels like if you like a crispy egg, I’m like, ok you’re my people, right, like you understand the vibe.
JG
A British fried egg is very different from a Southeast Asian fried egg.
BM
It takes more attention on the plate, whereas like a silky sunny side up, it’s a little quieter, it’s more like a side, right, like you eat it with something else. Whereas the crispy egg it offers so much, like variation in it so you’re like, ok, this can stand alone. The crispy egg is the way.
JG
Why do you think we do put eggs on everything, why? Why do we put an egg on it?
What do I say putting an egg on it - so I was today years old when I learned that the term ‘egging someone on’ actually comes from the phrase ‘putting an egg on it’ which means to urge someone on to do something usually foolish or a bit silly. I honestly had no idea where that to egg someone on came from a longer phrase. had come from.. The only thing that I associate with the phrase ‘putting an egg on it’ is that adding an egg is the only possible way to make a dish more delicious than it already is.
BM
This is why I got so into them in the pandemic which is the purely sort of practical and functional argument is that they’re cheap - you know this has changed - they were pretty affordable especially when you’re thinking about protein sources that don’t require a lot of effort, you can just cook an egg and it feels like that’s enough - I think it’s about the fact that they’re nutritionally rich, they’re functional, you can buy like a dozen and it lasts you a while so I think that’s like the basic argument, but at the same time I think there’s also the psychological element right where eggs are very sort of conceptually satisfying because, essentially, in every preparation except for a scrambled the egg, it has these two parts, it has the white and the yolk and there is always this way that you reveal the yolk in some way - the sunny side up egg for example, it asks you to be involved with it, you’re gonna pop it, you’re gonna put your toast in it, something like that so I think that feels really satisfying for people and I think that also like they provide a great visual, like there’s so many prints of eggs and spoon rests shaped like sunny side up eggs so I think that that is very inherently satisfying
JG
So, I was looking into the symbolism of an egg and why humans are so drawn to them and to the way that they look. So eggs have always been really important to most cultures and societies - we’ve eaten them since the beginning of existence, they were particularly important when we were hunter gatherers, because if a hunt wasn’t successful, we could always rely on eggs as being a fall back source of protein. So eggs represent life in more ways than one, obviously a lot of different animals come from an egg cell but they also kept us alive by eating them. And so I looking into the imagery symbolism of eggs - the egg itself is this oval which was also seen as something that contained life so often represented the earth as a whole or represented the universe.
BM
I think also especially on social media, I’ve noticed right from being an instagram person, that there are some foods that do better than other foods in terms of likes and what draws people and I think eggs are one of those things where I know that if I post one it will do well. Most people recognise what it is, it looks satisfying, you can mess up an egg but most of the time they do look really nice and they add this pop of colour even if it’s just on a bowl of rice. You know I think that especially as we’re moving towards this landscape that’s obsessed with reels and TikToks and short form video, I think the egg offers a lot of appeal in that regard because it’s immediately eye catching, you know what it is, you don’t need it to be explained to you but it always does offer this kind of tension to it because you see an egg in a video and you know that that yolk is gonna pop or you know that the egg is going to sizzle in the pan into a cooked egg, so it guarantees this visual pay off which I think is why I think they do so well on social media.
JG
It’s like the theatre, like egg is a theatre.
BM
You know if I compare some of the foods that don’t do well are foods that are not immediately recognisable like if you need to explain things to people - There’s a lot more barriers to them liking it or watching the video but an egg is one of those things where every culture is familiar with it, even just watching things, like I want to watch an egg.
JG
Yeah I could watch eggs all day! Hindu culture or Jain culture like they don’t eat eggs but probably every other culture has eggs. Everybody eats an egg.
There really are only a handful of cultures that I can think of that don’t eat eggs - Hindus, Jains and some Orthodox Sikhs don’t eat eggs because they practice Veganism. Obviously vegans don’t eat eggs and Jews don’t eat eggs with blood spots in them. I found a fun fact that the Japanese eat the most eggs - the average Japanese person eats 320 eggs per year.
BM
And it’s just like one of those things where even if you don’t eat it you know what it is.
JG
An egg is the only thing that looks like an egg
BM
Yeah and I think eggs still offer this interesting thing where there is still variation in them right, like I feel like, there are these eggs, you know you see these eggs with the really hyper orange yolk
JG
Yeah, golden yolk.
BM
There’s still potential for an egg to sort of subvert your expectations, like I’ve never seen an egg that looks like that before, so you can still feel excited, even though it’s something that’s still so basic.
JG
Eggs are exciting.
EGG citing. Do you get it?
Do you think that social media is kind of responsible for the rise of the egg?
BM
I mean I think it’s not a chicken and an egg situation but…
JG
Haha, well it is!!!
(They laugh)
BM
But I don’t think it’s responsible for it but I do think the popularity of eggs on social media makes sense because I think they are natural fits for each other.
JG
And what about the kind of future of the egg? Eggs are expensive now, all proteins are expensive and also we have this looming climate catastrophe, or I guess we’re in the climate catastrophe right now, what will happen to eggs?
BM
In the early pandemic they felt like the really obvious thing and I was making maybe like a disconcerting number of eggs a week like I was going through a lot but I find myself naturally eating fewer eggs, partially because of the price, but also partially because I over egged myself and I feel like at least for me it’s been a good reminder that over reliance on any one ingredient isn’t an ideal situation. You know I think eggs are good and it's good to have them as a protein source but at the same time for me it’s been really useful to be like ok sometimes I won’t eat an egg, I’ll eat a tofu scramble which I actually like more than scrambled eggs or you know instead of using them as my like easy short cut for a meal, maybe I’ll play with beans this time, even if it takes a little more effort or I have to think about it a little more so I think the future of the egg is that I’m personally trying to eat less of them just because for me I think it’s kind of boring for me to eat eggs all the time, they are delicious but…
JG
You wanna switch it up
BM
I do like leaning on an egg on rice but if you eat that for 7 days it gets a little tired. I also think for me it’s been really interesting, I also realise that I don’t wanna waste my egg in the sense that, what is the usage that is going to let the egg shine, right. And, like most of the time that’s like I want the nice poached egg on a salad, I don’t necessarily want to use 4 eggs to make cookies so it’s taught me to diversify, particularly with baking, to diversify what I’m doing and maybe lean on applesauce or flax seed in certain preparations where it’s like oh yeah I dont’ actually need the egg there and I think that that’s something that more people would probably benefit from because there are all these applications where we probably don’t need to use all these eggs to make this cake when we can use other ways to bind and get that moisture in there.
JG
I think you’re right.
It’s kind of interesting to hear you talk about the egg, it kind of reminds me of conversations that we were having around meat a few years ago where people were not necessarily stopping eating meat entirely but they were just eating less and it’s kind of like the egg is there.
So according to the Guardian and the BBC, in 2021, it was found that the average Brit has cut their meat intake in the last decade by a whopping 17%. And that is mainly to do with concern for the climate because farming and eating meat has an enormous carbon footprint. In recent years the cost of living crisis has also contributed to Brits eating less meat and this has also extended to dairy - in 2019, a study was released that found that dairy intake had decreased in the UK, in another more recent study it was found that a third of all Brits uses plant milk in teas and coffees. And I supposed eggs will be the next animal product to follow this trajectory, but I couldn’t actually find any data about whether egg consumption has dropped, and I guess this is because the egg shortage because of avian flu and the rising cost of the egg because of inflation has only really happened in the last year, I doubt there’s any reliable evidence to really back this up, but it does makes sense that with the climate crisis and cost of living crisis that it is the next animal product to be treated with more caution by the consumer.
I don’t know what it’s like in the States but here we don’t have enough eggs because of Avian flu.
BM
We’ve definitely had those as well I think it’s gotten a little bit better at least in terms of at my grocery store I can find them more, one thing I also really noticed with that was that some of the, the really cheap eggs that I’d been buying that’s where I saw the big price jumps, but some of the more expensive eggs that were always more expensive those kind of stayed the same price wise. I was buying those slightly more expensive eggs, you know from like the small farmer because suddenly they were very close in price to what had initially been the cheap egg. And so I think that did just make me realise like ‘Oh yeah, I can be more intentional about sort of how I’m sourcing my eggs and where I’m sourcing them and all of that is not going to be perfect but I’ve realised that, you know, this is what I do with meat and it’s what I do with cheese, try and buy better when I can and just use less of those things or more conscious about how I’m eating them so maybe I’ll try and buy the more expensive and more locally sourced eggs and eat them less frequently than if I were ready to eat a whole dozen of cheap eggs per week.
JG
Yeah. Absolutely and I guess that’s something that we should all be doing is buy the best you can afford and treat them as special, I suppose. Which, maybe people take eggs for granted a little bit because they have always been cheap.
BM
Yeah absolutely I mean I think this moment has made a lot of people rethink their relationship to things that we saw as staples.
JG
Absolutely and I think eggs are one of them. And I think the egg shortage caught everyone by surprise a little bit. I think everyone was expecting it to be meat or something a little bit more exotic, but the egg? It was a bit of a surprise I think.
BM
I think that’s really been the challenging thing because it’s been so many staples, at least here, it’s been eggs and it’s been butter that have really had these huge price increases. You know, those are still lasting, especially with butter. Yeah, it just makes me feel like oh yeah these basic things that we used, maybe they were too underpriced in the first place. It’s definitely been very sobering to realise that.
JG
Sobering is the word.
When you’re cooking you’re cooking for yourself and someone else right? You’re not necessarily cooking for just you.
BM
Yeah, like I would say most lunches and dinners I’m cooking for myself and my partner, but breakfast is definitely one of those meals that I’m just doing generally for myself. I definitely appreciate, you know, there are nights when we do our own thing and it’s nice to take care of my own dinner. And just… I like cooking for other people but I think there is something really nice about cooking a meal that’s just for yourself. Also I really like eating a meal alone as someone who is often cooking in a way that feels more shared, this is for me, this is my little moment to make this meal.
JG
Do you cook differently for yourself, will you cook yourself different things?
BM
I think so, I mean I think the big one is I know what my partner doesn't like. For example, he doesn’t like zucchini
JG
Oh man!
BM
It’s the one vegetable he doesn’t really like, but I really like zucchini, so that will be my opportunity where I’ll make the zucchini pasta. Or I think it’s just sometimes, you I know I like doing something that feels extra just for myself, you know, I don’t always want to bread like a chicken cutlet because that is kind of intensive, laborious, lots of dishes but I do feel like I like the act of eating a chicken cutlet by myself, I like the feeling of having put all this work into it so I think sometimes I do gravitate towards more fussy things when it’s just for me, I like the process. I’m definitely a person who likes cooking that is involved and so I like being able to do that and it’s just for me, I can take my time with it or I can listen to my podcasts, it becomes a whole experience for me to do.
JG
It’s a lovely process I think. I think a lot of people who are cooking for themselves most of the time may lose that process a little.
BM
I really like making a fussy breakfast, I do sort of intentionally get up early so that I can make potatoes and eggs and some other thing if I want and sit and eat it and take pictures of it, um so I definitely think that I block out time in my life to have involved solo meals.
JG
Oh, that’s wonderful, I hope more people can do stuff like that for themselves. I think it’s a nice attitude to have about cooking for yourself. Do you have a kind of go-to dish that you cook for yourself?
BM
I guess I will say I’m also a person who doesn’t have a go to necessarily, but I think my favourite format of breakfast in particular is I love to do a crispy egg with some nice steamed or sauteed kale and then, ideally if I have them, some seared mushrooms, or tomatoes and then really nice toast with lots of butter on it. I think that’s my good formula for breakfast.
JG
Yeah that sounds delicious, that will keep you going until lunch.
BM
Yeah and it’s one of those things where I can do it all in one pan, the system is down, I can vary the ingredients depending on what I have, it’s pretty easy to execute, so I think that’s what I like
JG
Yeah I think ease is the key when you’re on your own
BM
Or I think having the process really streamlined!
JG
Thankyou to Bettina for such an enlightening chat about something that I eat almost every day. I really enjoyed listening to what she had to say about the egg’s place in society, I know I’ve kind touched upon why eggs are important to us, but it’s also really important to come back to the present and look at what a particular food means now and also what the future of it might be.
I’ve posted some egg related articles that Bettina has written on this episode’s page. I will be posting a recipe for a very extra chicken cutlet for one - served with an egg on it, obviously. Because I am a fan of being extra on your own - Bettina is an advocate for this.
Obviously, chickens lay eggs and there’s a few dishes across the world that kind of play on combining chicken meat with eggs - so that’s kind of what I’ve based this dish on - there’s holstein schnitzel, which is a paprika breaded cutlet topped with a fried egg and actually quite a common dish in Portugal where I used to live, is a chicken breast roasted so that the skin is crispy with a fried egg. And I’ll also post a kind of guide to a crispy egg and what I think the perfect crispy egg entails, so look out for that on the blog. So, the recipe, the blog post and episode plus all of the other recipes and all of the other blog posts and all of the other episodes are on Howtoeatalone.substack.com. If you like, you can subscribe to the How to eat alone Substack page, it’s free for now and you can follow the podcast on instagram, the handle is @howtoeatlaonepodcast. If you like the how to eat alone podcast, please consider giving it a 5 star rating wherever you get your podcasts from or you can share it with someone who you think might like it too! I hope you’ve enjoyed being alone with me, and I’ll see you next time for the next episode of HOW TO EAT ALONE.
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