Foolproof? .... not for the feeder..

Do you believe in pre-cognition?  I will swear on whatever you want me to that I AM NOT making this up..

In Thursday's posting about shrimp, to make a point about Cook’s Country, I drew what I though was a clever analogy to illustrate my point. I tried to pick something exaggerated (or should that be “eggs-agerated”?), and somehow the simplicity of a seemingly trivial task of frying an egg came to mind.  Completely out of my demented brain I wrote: “As we all know, that is typical of the Christopher Kimball empire of Cook’s Illustrated, featuring the “forget everything you ever knew about frying an egg” approach to (mostly scientific) cooking”. 

So fast forward a few days, and this arrived in the mail:

In case your eyes are like mine, notice the second entry on the cover:

I couldn’t believe my (failing) eyes!  I turned to the article on Page 12 where it was entitled “Perfect Fried Eggs”, noting that they had already used up “best” and “foolproof” on the BBQ chicken.  The article followed the formula, whine a bit about how creating a perfect “diner” (meaning the eating place) fried egg at home was hard, “so I started out to…” same stuff.  One little nugget of knowledge was that they claim the white will set at 158°, while the yolk won’t get going until about 180, and therein lies the problem. The difficulty lies in getting the white and the yolk to be done without over or under cooking either one.  I kind of go along with that, is that your experience also?    Again he tried several schemes including basting the egg with hot oil (attributed to José Andrés), cold pan slow, hot pan fast, etc..  Finally he came up with the following technique (for four eggs):

·       Heat a nonstick skillet over low heat for 5 (!) minutes with 2 teaspoons of vegetable oil

·       Increase heat to medium high until oil is shimmering

·       Add 2 teaspoons of unsalted butter which have been cut into 4 pieces, quickly swirling to coat pan.

·       Add pre-cracked eggs (two in two bowls)

·       Cover and cook for one minute

·       Remove from heat and let stand, covered, 15 to 45 seconds for runny yolks, longer for different degree of viscosity.

Sounds easy enough, eh?  Only question(s) in my mind were:  use hot or cold eggs to begin with; and my typical quandary of what is “low” and “medium high” heat.  So yesterday morning I set out to try that procedure.  Left eggs out overnight, and in the morning assembled the stuff (mise en place) including the last of our WAG Canadian Bacon:

 

 

To follow the recipe exactly (it’s science, see) I used the timer to assure the correct time for pre-heating the pan

(Note there are no more images of the actual cooking due to a frightening labor intensive couple of minutes as follows)

Set the pan over "low" heat ... waited the exact five minutes, and then....

 

Increased the heat to whatever I thought “medium high” might be, and then MFO and I watched the two teaspoons of oil, trying to determine when it was “shimmering”.  When we saw some motion on the surface (a couple of long minutes on "medium high") We finally decided okay, let’s go!

I took the butter, threw it in the pan where it basically exploded into bubbles and steam and almost immediately turned brown (and you know what that means...).  Crap!  No turning back now, I grabbed the little dishes of egg, poured one in one side of the pan and the other across from it.  Once again huge amounts of hissing and bubbling from the whites and the edges quickly began to brown.  Started the one minute timer, slapped the cover on the pan which muted the hissing and popping some.   After a minute more, I yanked it off heat, and let it set for another 65 seconds (yolks supposed to be runny but set).  Finally, hesitatingly, I removed the cover hoping to see the “perfect fried eggs” and Voila!  I got:

Yikes! this is not exactly what I had envisioned.  a disaster!  Yolks were “blown out”, completely cooked, and the whites were well, unappetizing.  But what are you going to do (electing not to just pitch them), I plated up the best of the bunch

And we ate them.  The interior of the yolks of one were not completely hard

 

And, of course the bacon was just fine.  So with all that fuss, effort, and meticulous timing, they were pretty much a failure.  I ascribed that mostly to too high of heat all the way around.  Plus any time you cover eggs, you lose the “sunny side” to a veil of white.  I think I will try it again sometime with a little less of the “shimmering” part, but there is a little voice somewhere that says:  why bother?  It’s just a damn egg..

Of course we were

DFB

Andrea’s Contribution