My plan to cook something new and interesting once a week has been horribly derailed by life. 2012 is off to the worst start I could possibly imagine. Severe extended family health issues; extreme personal poverty due to our own health expenses; our car breaking down in the middle of one of California’s busiest highway on-ramps and left my wife stranded in horrible freeway traffic for an hour (and has left me scrambling to find the money to pay for repairs); Cat missing a flight to visit her family due to a traffic jam (which cost us even more money to rebook); agonizingly difficult business decisions to be made; a giant chunk missing from my thumb; and more! All in less than two weeks. 2012 may or may not be the end of the world, but I feel like I’m going to be lucky to live through the year.
I’m not trying to complain or dredge up sympathy; I just want you to understand that in light of all of this, I’ve cheated a little in order to maintain my commitment to blogging about food once a week. Instead of cooking something new, I whipped up something old that I mastered while Cat was sick over the past couple of years. She’s perfectly fine now, but while she was sick (for quite a while) she rarely had much of an appetite and I could often only to convince her to eat her default comfort food, eggs over rice. Not the absolute healthiest of foods, but at least it contains enough protein and carbs to keep a body going in tough times. As many times as I made this meal for her, I have become quite good at making perfect eggs and flawless steamed rice. The latter is something I’m especially proud of, because it is knowledge that is meant to be forbidden to the white man. I am the pale Prometheus of the kitchen.
Unfortunately it’s very difficult to make semi-cooked eggs look appetizing with a camera phone, but trust me when I say that these are amazingly delicious. Cat taught me her technique, and I improved on and perfected it; much like Darth Vader, now I am the master (which of course means now I get stuck doing kitchen duties whenever she has the craving for these).
Here is the process:
1. Crack x number of eggs into a bowl. It can be one, it can be a dozen (though for health’s sake you’d better be cooking for several people if you drop a whole carton in there).
2. Season to taste. The mix I’ve arrived at is as follows: one dash each of ground black pepper and coriander per egg. 1/2 dash each of finely ground red pepper and dried orange zest per egg. A few drops of e.v. olive oil and Vietnamese fish sauce (nuoc mam) per egg. The fish sauce serves the role of salt and adds a little kick. Be super careful with it, though; if you use too much, the eggs will smell fishy, taste inedibly salty, and turn an unappetizing grey color.
3. Add one splash of low-fat milk per egg. This is important! It makes the eggs fluffy.
4. Warm iron skillet over medium heat.
5. Whisk the eggs rapidly until they’re frothy — at least 30 seconds, preferably a full minute.
6. Your skillet is the correct temperature when you flick a little water at it and the water beads up instead of simply hissing and evaporating. Once it’s reached this point, quickly dry the water out and pour in a splash of olive oil — just enough to heat the pan.
7. Pour in the egg mixture before the oil begins smoking. Use a spatula to pry and flip the cooked egg and heat the raw part evenly. Or if you want to impress the rubes, shake the pan rapidly as the egg begins to cook to keep it from sticking and flip it by flicking the pan upward once the top side of the egg has cooked enough not to splash everywhere. Julia Child did it this way; I’ve gotten it to work successfully once. Usually I just make a mess. There’s no shame in using the spatula.
8. Remove from heat when the eggs still display only the faintest hint of wetness. They’ll continue to cook for a little while, so pulling them off the heat before they look fully dry will keep them from being too dry and hard once you eat them.
9. Serve with rice or bread or bacon or whatever and be amazed that the humble scrambled egg can be so damn good.
I used to work with an army chef who taught me his “golden ratio” for scrambled eggs was half an egg’s worth of milk for each egg you put in.
I like this as it’s easy to measure since you crack the eggs in half to use them anyway, it’s consistent as you always have eggshells rather than an ambiguous “splash”, and saves having to wash up a measuring cup afterwards.
Also it’s totally lazy (and ruins milk proteins) but I’ve taken to cooking mine in the microwave. 30 second bursts then mash, repeat until you’re happy with the consistency.
You can add a small handfull of cheese too, if you like.
That’s too much milk, in my opinion. Makes the eggs watery and unpleasant. And I can’t stand microwaved eggs — there’s no texture to them. They’re fine that way if you bury them in a sandwich or something, but if you’re planning on enjoying the eggs on their own it’s worth the trouble to prepare them on the stove.
I think you would also find that this recipe is much better than using cheese! It makes for eggs that are more savory than rich.
Orange zest eh? That’s a new one on me, I’ll give that a shot. I would say worcestershire is a good alt to nuoc mam, both to those without access to an asian section of the supermarket and because it’s freaking yummy in eggs.
I hadn’t considered worcestershire, but yeah, that sounds good. It’s thicker than nuoc mam but that shouldn’t make a difference in the portions used in the recipe.
I love experimenting endlessly on old recipes, perfecting them. I’ve sharpened up my brown rice skills, scramby skills, cookie skills, and oatmeal skills. I’m working on fermenting vegetables now. I usually use 1 tsp. of water per large egg, although I’m going to try the seasonings you suggested. Hope 2012 improves.
That sounds delicious! Scrambled eggs are great on their own, and such a flexible base for new flavors. I’ll have to give it an attempt sometime (probably with Worcestershire sauce, unless I can find some equivalent fish sauce in the local Korean grocery stores). I do appreciate these GameSpite excursions into non-video gaming ways for a more enjoyable life.
I’ve been delving into hardcore poverty, too. Soaking pinto beans all night is so… fun.
Growing up with primarily kosher cuisine means that my family practically never cooked with milk (even though milk is totally OK to combine with eggs, if you’re not having any meat), so the idea of scrambled eggs with milk still weirds me out. For my eggs, I whisk in onion powder, paprika, and a dash of hot sauce. Sometimes I add cut-up salami and/or mushrooms, if I have them. If you live in a Commonwealth country, you can also buy HP Sauce (brown sauce), which are fantastic on eggs.