Newsletter 3 - Love Letter To An Egg
And how to make it perfectly crispy...
Hello and welcome to newsletter number three of the 'How to eat alone’ project, belated due to a fruitful couple of weeks of cooking for a retreat on a Swedish island. Anyway…
My last couple of posts have been particularly egg-heavy. In podcast Episode 14, EGGS ARE OUR FRIENDS, I spoke to food writer Bettina Makalintal about why the egg is true and reliable friend of the solo chef. We discussed, at length, the particular joy of the ‘crispy’ egg and the recipe that followed the episode was for a chicken cutlet for one topped with such an egg. This newsletter was supposed to be a recipe/guide to how to fry your eggs to crispy perfection. In preparation for this, I made-and-then-ate crispy eggs almost every day for 10 days straight, obsessively recording time-to-perfect-crispiness, trying out different heats, different cooking fats, different utensils to do the egg-flipping. I have enjoyed it immensely. There are many ways to eat a crispy egg — atop sticky rice or with a dollop of pesto or slathered in spicy sauce. But in the end it’s all been overkill. Despite all the eggsperiments (sorry), ultimately, I’d still be instructing you how to fry an egg. And I just don’t have the right (or perhaps wrong) amount of audacity to do that.
Eggs, as well as belonging to the group of foods that I call the solo cook’s friends, are a food that I assume most of us, whether we are alone or not, have cooked at some point in our lives. I’m not sure I will ever get my hands on the statistics to prove this statement, but eggs (like pasta and noodles and rice and sandwiches) are one of the first things many of us learn to make for ourselves. Frying an egg is possibly the easiest and most efficient ways to cook one. Ergo my conclusion as to why I think most people have fried an egg. Even inanimate buildings can, at times, fry an egg.
I learnt how to first cook eggs when I was 11. I would leave for school early so I was up at 6.30 a.m, creeping around in the kitchen with only the light above the stove on. I would take three eggs, crack them, beat them, turn on gas, heat up oil, add seasoning and scramble accordingly. Nowadays, scrambled eggs (as Bettina also says during Episode 14), give me the ick. The texture of them is never correct. They are either paper dry or suspiciously soggy. But for my 11 year old palette, they are what I needed to prepare me for my day.
The next egg that I fell in love with was the poached variety. It was as I was learning to cook properly, just before I started cheffing professionally. I loved making a tornadic waterspout to encourage the perfect poached sphere, I loved the science of the vinegar binding the egg. But poaching eggs was almost always done for someone else. It became my morning-after trick, I was the girl who could perfectly poach an egg hungover, panda-eyed and running on very little sleep.
Over the next few years, I had various affairs with the funnest and fussiest of eggs — I marinaded and pickled them, I made okinomiyaki, deep fried scotch eggs and, for a brief period of time, I even devilled them. These were showstopper eggs that worked well with the extroverted lifestyle of a twenty-something year old. But, most recently, during and post pandemic, it has been the humble boiled egg that has became my trusty sidekick. During my time in Covid-induced isolation alone, I started to make myself a runny, 7-minute boiled egg most mornings. The rest of my pandemic cooking was a bit of a shit show, but when I could be bothered to make an egg in the morning, at least the first few hours of the day were stable and settled. It was as if I had returned, 20 years later, to being 11 years old, creeping peacefully around in the kitchen alone, making silent eggs. The 7-minute egg is well regarded. 7 minutes is time enough to cook the white, not time enough to fully cook the yolk, so the orange middle is creamy but dipping a buttery toast soldier into it is still possible. A few months in to the pandemic, it would be this same unassuming 7-minute boiled egg that alerted me to the fact that my business partner was a psychopath and that I should probably get out of the business we shared together.
When we were finally allowed visitors at home in Portugal once restrictions were lifted, I made brunch in my apartment for my two business partners. We had all invested in Business Partner Number 1’s restaurant in Lisbon. Of course, I boiled eggs for brunch and, as I did so, Business Partner Number 1, a chef who I can only describe as having the temper of Marco Pierre White and the self-assurance of Salt Bae, peered over my shoulder and actively bullied me into boiling them for a meagre 5 minutes. Now, requesting someone boil an egg for them in a certain way as far I’m concerned, is no crime. But ordering someone to do something as innocuous as boil an egg is unacceptable. I knew how to cook an egg because everyone knows how to cook an egg. Cooking an egg, in that exact moment, resided in the place where my gut feeling resided, and my intuition was telling me to get this man (who didn’t even know about the 7 minute egg?!) out of my house. When BP#1 had left me alone and sat down at the dinner table, I stole two more minutes, making his 5 minute eggs into my desired 7. Later, when he cut into the yolk and found it perfectly cooked, not realising that it was indeed a 7-minuter, he semi-whispered to himself ‘perfect,' — I am sure he was talking about himself, but I had won! My egg was perfectly mine. It was this small, eggy thing that shifted my perspective. I would not be scolded over an egg. To me, criticising the way that people like to cook and eat things is the ultimate form of control. It was the egg that finally broke the camel’s back and galvanised me into employing a lawyer to begin extracting (eggstracting?) myself from the business.
And so, this was supposed to be a recipe for crispy eggs, but somehow it has turned into a love letter, a thank you and an homage to the egg. As food often does, eggs have somehow punctuated significant moments of life, not just the happy ones, but the lonely ones and the sticky situations. Eggs, too, are useful tools. They sustain us when things are tight, they taught me new cooking methods (boiling, poaching, frying, baking, soufflé, baking, custard, meringue, the list is endless…). They are reliable and always there. And so, I say an immense thankyou to my eggy friends.
And just so that I can kind of add some use to your day and vaguely attempt to answer my original brief, here are some things I have learnt by eating 10 crispy eggs in 10 days.
The best way to fry and egg is either with vegetable oil or butter. Don’t bother with olive oil, it goes rancid and gives the egg a bitter taste. And if you are still frying eggs with animal fat like bacon or goose fat, stop, you’ll clog up your little heart.
To get an extra bit of crispiness, add salt to the white just as you put it in the pan.
The pan needs to be so hot that it is almost smoking. One minute on each side is fine.
Silicone spatulas are by far the best way to flip an egg.
If you don’t have a non stick pan, your egg frying attempts will never be successful.
Thanks for reading! The next episode of the podcast will be out in approximately a month’s time and probably won’t have anything to do with eggs.