Let the Great Experiment Begin!1

I watched curling² on TV today for the first time. Curling is that silly sport with the brooms that is the official snack-break of winter olympics watchers. I can't say that it holds a candle to ski-jumping or this (thanks, Will), but it is unequivocally more interesting than the biathlon, and here's why: (1) It's a strategy game--"rocks in the house," "he's got the hammer," "hard line," "let it curl"--all of the best strategy games have great, impenetrable idioms ("Sicilian defense, dragon variation" comes to mind). (2) You actually get to see what's happening, unlike the biathlon. I'm waiting with bated breath for the bullet-cam. You know, biathlon matrix-style. It's the only chance they've got. Watching a nice curl is kind of like watching a great ping pong or tennis game in slowmo where you get to appreciate all the spin put on every shot. (3) Finally, curling is a mixture of extreme concentration and at times--here's what I love about it--absolute panic. Sometimes they let the rock slide and the ice is completely silent, and sometimes the skip (please excuse my novice errors in curling terminology) is screaming at the absolute top of his fucking lungs at the sweepers to stop being such lazy assholes and sweep the goddamn ice. This panic on the part of the skip paired with the zeal and enthusiasm with which the sweepers comply with his panicked hollering is inherently hilarious. If the skip has botched his throw the most the can do is yell at the sweepers to clean up his mess. As if the skip's inability to do anything once he releases weren't tense enough, there's something that is fundamentally anxiety inducing in being forced to watch someone else do what you think you can do better. That's the kind of relationship I imagine between the skip and the sweepers.³

One reason that curling has showed up here is that after watching it, I had to get it out of my system. I just couldn't not talk about it. The other reason is that it has a vague, tenuous relation to poaching eggs, the actual subject of this post. I liked curling for the same reason that I liked a little egg-poaching experiment that I did a few weeks ago. A subtlety of motion and careful technique is essential to curling, and to well-poached eggs. However, there's also that oh-my-god-what-have-i-done, everything-is-going-to-hell, my-beautiful-egg-is-losing-it's-shape moment of panic that makes things so exciting as you try to coddle your poorly-curled egg into some sort of togetherness. This is part of the reason that people think that egg poaching and curling are difficult. Well, egg-poaching isn't really that hard, or so I discovered.

First of all, I know that doubling up on the eggs is poor form; however, you need to stop whining and poach yourself some. It'll be worth it. The light satiny texture of poached whites with the umami goodness of warm, runny yolk is glory incibuate.⁴

As it turns out, there's a lot of cooking that has to do with science and a lot of cooking that has to do with "science." I happened to be in the presence of a scientist (or "scientist"?) last weekend who mildly tolerates my food experimentation. Nicole was visiting me in Seattle and when it came time to make some brunch, she and I decided to have a friendly little competition between to egg-poaching virgins. Actually, saying that we "decided" is a bit disingenuous. Nicole strong-armed me with her spirit of antagonism into having a competition. Here are the results. You be the judge:

Nicole's Egg:




Peter's Egg:





In the interest of full disclosure (and not sore-loserness) I took the picture of Nicole's egg and she took the picture of mine. And you can't really judge from pictures anyway, so whatever. It's not like anyone's judging. But, if you are, notice that beautiful runny yolk oozing out of my egg's glorious dome, and think Hagia Sophia. Here are the thoughts that we gathered on technique:

{+} Poach an Egg

Poached Egg
For one


1 egg
1 tbs vinegar

This is less a recipe than an explanation of technique. So here's the step by step that we came up with:

1. Boil water in a small pot. We used my 2.5-quart pot filled with 2 inches or so of water.

2. While the water is boiling, get your egg ready. One of the tricks to keeping the egg together is to place it as gently as possible into the water. To do this, Nicole and I cracked our eggs into a small mug.

3. Once the water boils, turn off the heat. You want to get the water hot enough, but it needs to be still when you put the egg in. Add the vinegar now. From what we read on the internet, vinegar helps to keep the whites around the yolk because of some "chemical reaction." We used unseasoned (meaning, unsweetened) rice vinegar. Any clear, mild vinegar should be fine.

4. When there are no longer any more bubbles in the water (not even small ones) ease your egg with the gentleness of an expert curler into the warm water.


5. When you ease the egg into the water, you should be ready with a large spoon. Use the spoon to coddle the egg and stop the white from dispersing itself in the water. In our experience, some strands of white are unavoidable, but unproblematic.


6. Once the egg has stopped spreading (20 seconds, maybe) cover the pot and let sit off the heat for 4 minutes. You want the white to be cooked, but the yolk to be runny.

7. Top with S and P.

Finally, we read some bologna about making a whirlpool in the pot to poach your egg. This seems unnecessary. It essentially serves the same function as coddling with the spoon. I imagine that the whirlpool helps to keep the white together by pressing it up against the edge of the pot. It's probably cool if you can get this to work, but by no means an essential technique.

We ate our silky little nubbins atop a bed of garlicky sauteed kale and wheat toast. Like eggs florentine, but with kale. And minus the hollandaise due to my unflagging laziness. Here's the scoop⁵ on that:

{+} Eggs Kalentine It

Eggs Kalentine
For one


1 Poached egg (see above)
1 Cup chopped Kale
1 clove garlic
1 tbsp Olive Oil
1 Piece of bread (or English Muffin)

Not much to this, really:
1. Sautee the Kale with the EVOO and the garlic (minced or crushed).


2. Toast the bread.
3. Egg on kale on bread.

This whole section was probably overkill. Whoops.

However, the kitchsperiments don't end with poaching eggs. You may remember that in my tzatziki post I mentioned that straining regular yogurt could yield something that approximates the consistency of greek yogurt. At the time, I didn't know that. Now I do. After doing some egg cleanup, we moved on to kitchsperiment 2: thickening yogurt. We infused some ginger and ate it as a sweet, tangy treat with honey. It was creamy and spicy and wonderful. Here's the lowdown:

{+} Strained Ginger Yogurt

Straining Yogurt
Yields half of whatever you start with

Plain Yogurt (as much as you want)
Chopped Ginger
Butter

The essential technique is this: put yogurt in layered cheese cloth (you should be able to get cheese cloth pretty easily at the gstore--they had it at the Safeway in Seattle). Hang it in the sink for a few hours until the volume is about half of what you started with. That's all there is to it.

We chopped some ginger and heated it briefly with the butter in order to tone down it's kick a touch. Then we mixed it with the yogurt before hanging it in the sink.

Before:

After:


I highly recommend doing this if you can't find/don't have greek yogurt. It may or may not (because of the volume loss) be more cost-effective than buying the Greek Yogurt straight.

Also, it's handy to have cheesecloth on hand. Just in case you want to make Ricotta...

Well, friends, that's all I've got for now.

Keep on brunching,
Peter

---

¹ Fünke. [Note: Clicking the footnote number here in the footnote now brings you back to where the footnote is in the text. How cool is that?]

² The only reason that it caught my attention is that a dear friend of mine, let's call him Bideon (something so embarrassing must be treated with the requisite anonymity in this public forum), has joined a curling league. It's a fascinating study in despair to ponder how far in to the abyss you must have descended to think sweeping ice is fun.

³ This is almost certainly my projection rather than any sort of fact of the matter about the personal dynamics of professional curling.

⁴ Gid, you may have to correct my bastardization of Latin here. I'm not even close to making a real word. It's just that incarnate was not quite right and grated on my vegetarian sensibilities.

⁵ I am currently reading Scoop by Evelyn Waugh for a little book-gathering that I am part of. It's a dry and humorous satire of British journalism and politics in the first half of the 20^th century. Also, it is unrelated to the Woody Allen movie. It is related to the new Brideshead Revisted movie in that Evelyn Waugh wrote Brideshead. Y'all can thank Kribs for the recommendation.

Eggs Clean. Eggs Dirty.

David Foster Wallace was right* that one of the repercussions of being a college graduate (and particularly, in his case and mine, a philosophy degree holder) is the gnawing desire to intellectualize all of the banalities of life.** And it's a temptation that's hard to resist. I was in the kitchen two weeks ago with the aim of an eggy Sunday brunch. Now, before I get too deep into this I want to state the simple truth of things: I could not decide if I wanted a robustly flavored brunch (think garlic-onion-feta omelet style, maybe some red pepper flakes, buttered toast), or something more delicate (avocado-fresh mozz-tomato poached egg on an english muffin). So, I went both ways. Actually, I went a third way, which may or may not deserve to be indicted by the "over-intellectualization" accusation. The third way, and the subject of this post is Eggs Clean, Eggs Dirty.



It's a standard solution to any dichotomous but non-mutually-exclusive problem: choose both. I had the time. I had the resources. I had the ganas. I would have some eggs clean (subtle, delicate, fresh flavors), some eggs dirty (halitosis-inducing). A yin and a yang on my breakfast plate: o, beautiful balance. The Apollonian and the Dionysian, if you will.*** My breakfast had a guiding principle, a metaphysical foundation, a real theme that I planned to repeat in variation in weeks to come. This, for the skimmers, is where the "over-intellectualization" comes into play. For Chrissake, it's an omelet. As I cooked I flipped and folded and kneaded and tossed around in my mind the now-titled Eggs Clean Eggs Dirty approach to brunch. From there, it grew. (In the interest of full disclosure, no one loves a two-for-one like I do.)

Now, what makes it worse is that I proceeded to preach Eggs Clean Eggs Dirty. Will heard about it. He was unimpressed. Not to let this crush my enthusiasm, I brought it to Kibbee and Rachel. They let me down a bit more gently, "It's amazing you've got the energy to cook two kinds of eggs..." (Note, ellipsis, not exclamation.) I didn't think this was a question of energy, I thought it was a question of an idea having power. It had balance, it satisfied all sorts of urges, I never had to settle on a single flavor set for my eggs again. These more abstract qualities, however, proved less than compelling in the world of dishwashing (sometimes I rationalize K&R's tepid response by imagining doing dishes in their 8" x 10" dribbly-faucet sink). In response, I've backed off the Eggs Clean Eggs Dirty as a brunch for everyone, and rationalized it to myself as a good way to get two brunch recipes on the blog at one time.

Enough thinking, time to eat. Egg brunch, for me at least, somehow has this wonderful ability to become very complicated without becoming too messy or too time-consuming. I really believe that doing two kinds of eggs at one time is less burdensome than it first appears. You don't have to take my word for it, you can try it. If you're sappy, it's a great love brunch: one person makes eggs clean, one eggs dirty, and you split!**** But you have to call it Eggs Clean Eggs Dirty.

Here it is: a case study, theory in action:

{+} Yin

Eggs Clean I: Avocado Mozzarella
Makes 1 Servings


1 Egg
Half Avocado
Ball of Fresh Mozzarella
1 Piece Toast (an Eng Muff seems apropos)
Salt and Pep to taste

1. Toast your toast!
2. Slice your Avocado and your fresh Mozzarella
3. Prepare your egg cleanly: fried, sunny side up, poached (more about egg poaching in the next post).
4. S and P on Avocado on Egg on Mozzarella on Toast.

And, we're done.

{+} Yang

Eggs Dirty I: Spinach Feta Omelet
Makes 1 Servings


1 Egg
1/2 Cup frozen Spinach
1/4 Onion
1/4 cup crumbled feta
1 Piece toast (I opted for nine grain)
2 Tbs Grated Parmesan (optional)
Salt and Pep to taste

1. Toast the bread.
2. A bit of oil and the onion into the pan! When the onions are translucent, add the spinach. Feel free to add some red pepper flakes. When things are soft, put them on the toast and keep it in the warm oven.
3. Do your egg up omelet-style. I just went for the fold-over method with the feta inside.
4. Parmesan on Egg on Spinach on Toast.

Take note: I did Eggs Dirty first as omelets stand up much more readily to staying warm in the oven.

Regretfully Yours,
Peter

* The 'was right' link is required reading. Here is some suggested reading.

** I'm pretty sure that DFW says "over-intellectualize." I don't want to commit to "over" yet because it seems unnecessarily pejorative to me. I expect my reluctance is nothing more than a knee-jerk defense of my default behavior. Whatever the case, what Wallace is actually after isn't a standard, cut-and-dry, conservative anti-intellectualism. Far from it (see: any non-fiction piece Wallace ever wrote). Instead, Wallace is worried that it's so incredibly easy to become absorbed in our own intellectual life. It's so easy to become caught up in the monologue in our heads and not pay attention to (1) what is happening around us, and (2) whether we are spending these moments of onanism thinking about things that really matter. For the real gist of it (and some better-crafted prose), read the linked speech. I just wanted to point out that Wallace thinks there's nothing wrong with a lot of the abstraction and intellectualzation that we do; and, I wanted to point this out mostly to defend my own habits. On an unrelated note, DFW coined one of my new favorite words in his essay "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never do Again": niagaracal. Like Niagara falls. This word is so money, but lamentably so rarely appropriate.

*** An abuse of terms, if ever there was one. But (1) I couldn't resist, and (2) we were talking about over-intellectualizing . . .

**** I'm convinced that this really sappy here's-how-to-make-it-if-you're-in-love tone comes from reading too many other food blogs. If I offended you, I apologize. If I embarrassed myself, ignore it.

Omelet Sandwich

For the past couple months or so, my go-to breakfast has been this egg sandwich cooked in the style of late-night Ghanaian street vendors. It is also ridiculously simple. You need:

A good sized omelet pan (about 10 inches is ideal, maybe a little bigger).
Eggs (however many you want, I find 3 is best).
Bread.
Some butter.
Fixins (whatever you like).

This is how it goes: Whip up the eggs in a small bowl like you would if you were making an omelet. Grease the pan with butter or cooking oil, turn to just below medium heat, and throw on the fixins. It can really be whatever you want. Onions are always a good call. I normally like a little bit of meat--chunks of sausage are quite delicious. My favorite fixins besides that are habanero and red chili peppers. I normally dice up one whole pepper of each variety to put in the omelet. For maximum spicyness, I throw the peppers in right before I pour the eggs onto the pan. Once you pour the eggs on, make sure the fixins are evenly distributed about the omelet, then don't touch it. Prepare your bread--I prefer small hoagie rolls here, but again, you can use whatever you like. Once the base layer of the omelet is cooked, go around the sides with a spatula and make sure that it is not stuck to the pan. Right before you put the bread on, you might like to throw on some cheese, or some gourmet lunchmeat. Trust me, it's delicious. When the egg on top of the omelet is still uncooked, put two pieces of bread that will make up your sandwich on top of it. Let them cook like that for a while, then fold the omelet in half between the two slices and cook the outsides of the bread for a little while until all the egg is cooked. Feel free to take liberties with this recipe--make the omelet however you like. It is always delicious.