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
- Cook the egg in the shell as above.
- 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.
- Crisp up the pancetta in’t oven
- Assemble: green purée, egg, pancetta
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{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
Hi Ed
I had kept this link for the temperature controller stored away for over a year (did you or Phil link to this a ways back?).
I have been holding on to it for when I no longer had the support of wealthy coked-up backers and I had to purchase my own circulators (how much are they in Oz now? I paid $1000 usd a piece for mine). I would love to see more results with this cheaper method.
Try a tender(ish) cut of beef with clarified butter in your slow cooker (infused with blah, blah) 55°C for 45 minutes or so (no bag needed or chamber vacuum machine).
You will probably enjoy the results.
Oh god, I want that now.
There is also an alternative to cooking the eggs like that by taking room temperature eggs and putting it in a pot of water at 68 degrees and then into an oven of 75 degrees for about 45 minutes and then you crack the egg out of the shell onto the dish. You get the same effect with the yolk but the whites separate a little, so they don’t look like boogly eyes. Also, it is too much effort if you’re lazy.
Thanks for the innovative way to cook eggs done precisely at choice temperature. I have been using SousVideMagic from freshmealssolutions.com. It is another PID temperature controller which I use to control rice cookers with much better performance (i.e., temperature stability) than slow cookers. I prefer this method of cooking sous vide rather than using an expensive immersion heater circulator, because it is very energy efficient and I can use it to cook stews and soups with out plastic pouches.
Hock, I’ll try thebeef recipe and I shall be doing plenty more in the future. $1,000 is a whopping amount for these circulators. Maybe somebody should start making them locally.
Jess, this isn’t exactly quick either. OOh, I think I;ll have an egg – in an hour and a half.
Edaname – maybe I should use a rice cooker if one comes my way.
Ed
In order for SousVideMagic to work its magic, all you need is a non fuzzy logic/microcomputer type rice cooker. Look for one with a big pot with simple cook/warm switch. Commercial rice cookers are the best.