Go to work on a 65/85 egg

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65/90 egg

Ingredients: serves two

2 eggs
4 slices of pancetta (he says thin but the only stuff I could find was round)

Herby stuff
100g butter
1/2 an onion. Diced finely.
i garlic clove. Diced finely.
One cup each watercress and flat leave parsley leaves.
One and a half cups baby spinach
25g grated parmesan
Salt and pepper to season

It’s just cooking not molecular gastronomy. But it is very precise cooking with the help of my new-fangled device, an Auber-WS PID Temperature Controller rigged up to a slow cooker.
What it allows me to do is cook at precision temperatures and sous vide.
Today I’m trying out an egg cooked at 65 C (149F) in the shell which is gives it an amazing gelatinous texture. It also makes the egg look a bit like a giant eyeball.
The recipe is for slow-cooked eggs with herb and parmesan purée and crisp pancetta from Justin North’s book French Lessons. The outrageous thing is that he suggests the home cook achieves the result by holding a thermometer in a pan of water. This is completely impractical. You’ll need a kettle an cold water at hand as I did to help maintain the correct temperature.
Even with my controller it is difficult to maintain at steady 65C. It kept dropping to 64C but as egg whites to begin to thicken at 63C and set at 65C it doesn’t matter that much.
I cooked mine for 85 minutes and the recipe recommends between one and one and a half hours.
If you can get a result with the egg you’ve done the hard bit.
I hope you can tell from the ingredients that this has that savoury glutamate thing happening. I though it would taste good.

What I didn’t realise quite how good it would be and it’s on the menu again tonight.

Method

  1. Cook the egg in the shell as above.
  2. Make the puree:
    • Heat 60g butter until it browns. Cool and strain.
    • heat the remaining butter in a pan. Soften the onion and garlic and then add the greens. Cook until wilted.
    • Strain to remove liquid
    • Whizz-up in a processor (Magimix here) leaving fairly course. Add the grated parmesan. Add the browned, strained butter.

    Add lemon and season to taste.

  3. Crisp up the pancetta in’t oven
  4. Assemble: green purée, egg, pancetta

Ed Charles is a journalist and digital consultant who spend the better part of the part two decades in Australia. He trained with IPC in London and has written for major international and national business and lifestyle titles. Establishing this blog in 2005, he was one of the first of a handful of food bloggers in Australia. He's spoken at the Melbourne Writers Festival and Emerging Writers Festival and has broadcasted regularly on food and digital media issues. He is currently writing a history of mankind told through food.

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