Eggs

A classic french toque is said to have 100 pleats, representing the 100 different ways one can cook an egg. I don’t know if that’s true, and I’m not here to talk about all (or any) of those methods, as I don’t think I’ve attempted more than twenty of them.

Eggs can be as enigmatic as they are versatile. The number of questions revolving around the egg (in the culinary sense) are almost as boundless as the ways there are to cook them, and it’s those questions I’m here to try to shed some light on, and maybe even answer. And everything here is in reference to hen (as opposed to quail, duck, etc.) eggs, unless otherwise specified.

Shell color

First of all, the color of the shell: does it matter? Most commercially sold eggs are either white or brown, but naturally-laid hen eggs can come in any shade between brown and white, including shades of yellow and even blue. In short no, it doesn’t matter. There’s no discernible difference in flavor, size, yolk-to-white ratio (which is pretty much always 1:1), quality or anything else, associated with the color of the egg’s shell. Why industrial egg farms have wound up selling either white eggs or brown eggs — and segregating their packaging by those colors — I can’t for the life of me figure out. By all accounts, there’s no difference.

With that in mind, I enjoy seeing a variety of colors represented in a carton of eggs that I’m buying for my home consumption, as I take that to indicate there has been minimal synthetic interference in the farming process (and I like my food to come from the most natural sources possible).

Yolk color

Before getting off the subject of color, typically, the closer to orange (or in some cases, even red) the yolk is in color, the better and more flavorful the egg can be safely assumed to be. Having said that, this type of deeply colored yolk usually only comes from legitimately farm-fresh eggs, and is rarely seen in commercially distributed brands of egg, which tend to have yolks of a more pale yellow color.

Refrigeration

Another issue that is often discussed is whether or not eggs need to be refrigerated. The answer is the all-too-familiar: it depends. In the US, commercially produced eggs are pasteurized for distribution and sale. Among the things that this process achieves is it strips away a protective chemical layer that eggs are naturally endowed with. When this layer is absent, eggs need to be refrigerated, but if the egg hasn’t been pasteurized and the layer remains intact, refrigeration is not necessary for the eggs to last several days (if not upwards of a week) at/around room temperature. This is why Europeans and Americans have such strong, differing opinions on egg refrigeration: Europe doesn’t mandate pasteurization, so European eggs don’t need to be refrigerated. All this being said, even pasteurized eggs can sit at room temperature for several hours without being significantly compromised.

Also, eggs should be cooked from around room temperature (getting them to this point is what recipes allude to when they tell you to temper your eggs). I don’t really know why, but they just behave better. This isn’t to say you can’t cook eggs straight out of the refrigerator. You’ll just get a slightly better result if you temper them a bit.

Grades

The grades that commercially-sold eggs bear on their packaging are reliably indicative of the quality they assess, with A being the lowest grade, and AAA being the highest. This quality designation refers to the edible interior of the egg (not the shell), and this is where things get a little interesting…

In my not-so-insignificant experience with eggs, it turns out that the shells of cheaper eggs are actually less likely to splinter, and the membrane between the shell and the white is thinner and easier to penetrate/sever. What I’m trying to say is that cheaper eggs are actually easier to cleanly crack. When I cooked eggs for a popular brunch restaurant (where we used A grade, industrially produced eggs), I would usually crack 80-100 eggs directly into the pan every service (this doesn’t include the orders of scrambled eggs, which we would pre-crack, season and scramble ahead of time), and I probably would only wind up with shell fragments in the pan from 5% of them. Comparatively, when I cook at home, I like getting the best quality eggs I can find, and I probably get pieces of shell in a third of the eggs I crack, using the same cracking technique I did when doing it at that job. Farm-raised organic eggs have sturdy, brittle shells that like to splinter, and membranes that don’t like to break. Cheap egg shells crack cleanly, and their membranes break easily.

Cracking an egg

Speaking of cracking/breaking eggs, there are a number of ways to do so, and lots of public discourse on which one is “correct”. Some say to crack it on a flat surface. Others say it’s best to crack eggs on the edge of a bowl or a pan. I’ve even heard multiple testimonies of using the blade of a knife to crack open an egg (please, don’t do that!). Conventional thinking might indicate that cracking an egg on the sharp edge of a bowl or pan is the best to cleanly sever and penetrate the shell. However the pushback on that method suggests that doing so would also lead to smaller shell fragments being forced into the egg, not to mention higher potential of breaking the yolk. This is what leads to the argument for breaking an egg on a countertop or otherwise flat surface.

What turns out to be the best way to crack an egg (again, in my not-so-insignificant experience) is on a towel laid on a countertop. I don’t know why and can’t explain the physics of it, but every time, it cleanly cracks an egg’s shell almost in half. It’s also best to hold the egg between your thumb and middle finger, with your index finger positioned behind the larger, more bulbous end of the egg, which should be pointing toward your fingertip. Hit the towel-covered counter with the widest part of the egg, just hard enough for the shell to crack.

Whenever possible, you should crack eggs into a small bowl or dish, as opposed to directly into a hot pan, so that if there are some egg shell shards that make their way into the egg, you’re not trying to fish them out of a hot pan. In the event of shell fragments breaking off into the cracked egg, the best way to fish them out is with a larger part of the shell. Again, I can’t explain the chemistry/physics of it, but essentially, the proteins in the shell attract one another, and it’s pretty mind-blowing to watch little pieces of shell almost jump into bigger ones when you go to scoop them out — especially if you’ve just spent over 30 seconds feeling like an idiot as you’ve tried to fish out the shell fragment with your fingers, which tends to have the opposite effect.

Okay, so maybe some ‘cooking method’ commentary

I’ve already alluded to all the ways that an egg can be cooked, and said I wasn’t going to comment on any of them. This is where I sorta go back on my word, as I address particulars about certain egg-cooking methods that I feel there’s a little too much confusion about.

Pan-cooking eggs

First of all, to pan-cook eggs, there are two things you need in order to do so successfully: a non-stick pan of some kind, and cooking fat. The pan can be teflon-coated, cast iron, or any of the newer attempts at replacing those two tried and true materials (ceramic, etc.), but either way, trying to cook eggs in a stainless steel pan is never going to go well. And no matter what the infomercials try to tell you about their new non-stick technology, you still need at least a little cooking fat to keep your egg(s) from sticking to the pan. In fact, next time you see such advertising, when they show the slow-mo shot of a fried egg fluttering off of the pan they’re selling, read the fine print at the bottom of the screen that says some amount of cooking oil is necessary for such a result. Clarified butter is the best cooking fat for pan-cooking eggs, but other fats (butter, oil, cooking spray, etc.) will work, albeit with varying degrees of effectiveness and/or resulting flavor.

Poaching an egg

Yes, splashing just a bit of distilled white vinegar into the poaching water will slightly help a cracked egg hold together. This is purely a chemically motivated step — not meant to impact the flavor of the egg.

Also, there’s the technique of creating a whirlpool in your poaching water before dropping in the egg. The idea is that the motion of the water will help wrap the white around the yolk, yielding a tighter, cleaner end result. While I’ve seen this technique work I’ve never personally pulled it off (only tried it once or twice, but still… nothin’). But it should be noted that with this technique, you can only poach one egg at a time, and I can’t for the life of me imagine a scenario in which this is an effective, adequately efficient output to serve more than one person. Not to mention, swirling the water exposes more of it to the air, cooling it off more than leaving it untouched, so this is something else that needs to be accounted for when establishing the heat level beneath the poaching pot.

Scrambled eggs

There are some details of this process that are debated — sometimes quite passionately. But like with many cooking techniques, there’s the fast practical way, and there’s the “correct” way. With my short-order cook’s perspective of egg cookery, I’ll be open about the fact that while it’s said eggs should be cooked slowly, I’m here to tell you that you can do them in under a minute with very fine results. Scramble the eggs in a bowl ahead of time. I know some say do this in the pan, but those are the same people who tell you scrambling eggs should take ten minutes. You can also season them ahead of time. I understand there’s some kind of chemical reaction with salt and egg, but from what I’ve been told (by people who have legitimate backgrounds in chemistry), the small amount of salt used to season eggs would need several days of intermingling before such a chemical reaction would really come to fruition.

There’s also the matter of adding milk or water or neither to the pre-scrambled eggs, and this is where things get interesting. I used to think that you added milk or cream to scrambled eggs to add richness and depth of flavor, and this is what got you fluffy eggs. I also scoffed at the idea of instead adding water, as I’m of the belief that adding water to a food is just diluting its flavor. It turns out that adding any of these liquids to scrambled eggs actually helps make them light and fluffy, as dairy is actually not responsible for this. Basically, when you cook eggs (or any animal protein for that matter), their proteins tense up and they become firm. What’s accomplished by mixing a (non-protein) liquid in is essentially it gets in between the protein strands, spacing them out and making the eggs feel less dense. That’s why adding liquid (dairy or water) makes scrambled eggs lighter and fluffier.

Boiled eggs

I’ve already written a blog post on boiling an egg, so I won’t dwell too much, but I do want to mention a couple things: 1) older eggs are easier to peel. I’m not talking about expired eggs, but boiling eggs that are maybe like… a week before their expiration date, will yield easier peeling than if the same egg were fresher. Also when it comes to peeling, it behooves you to crack each egg once it’s been cooked and chilled, then returned to the ice water bath for a bit. This allows some water to seep into the crack, and between the egg and the egg membrane, basically treating the water like a lubricant. The easiest way to peel a boiled egg is to crack the shell all the way around before trying to take pieces of the shell off, as opposed to trying to peel large piece of shell off. 2) speaking of making eggs easier to peel, the Julia Child method is the most reliably effective: After you’ve cooked your eggs and shocked/cooled them in ice water, bring a pot of water back to a boil. Put the cooled eggs into that boiling water for 30-60 seconds, before returning them back to the ice bath. This process will cause the egg beneath the shell’s membrane to expand and contract away from it a bit, somewhat loosening the shell (and membrane) away from the cooked interior.

Did I miss anything? If there are other tidbits you think I missed (or got wrong!), by all means leave a comment!