Monday, January 23, 2017

Sous Vide Scrambled Eggs

If you're scratching your head and wondering if I've gone off the deep end with all of these sous vide recipes lately ... well, maybe.

But also, I got a few cookbooks with sous vide recipes that I wanted to try. I recently bought Richard Blais's book Try This At Home, and when I browsed through it, the sous vide scrambled eggs caught my eye.

They're not really a recipe, I guess, but more of a side note about cooking technique. The actual recipe was Riley's Scrambled Eggs with Asparagus and Hollandaise.

I didn't make the asparagus or the hollandaise. But I used the sous vide method to cook some eggs.

The Recipe(ish):

Basically, you whisk together 4 eggs and a tablespoon of milk, along with salt and/or pepper to make you happy.

Preheat the sous vide water to 168 degrees, then drop the bag in for 10 minutes.

Fish the bag out, mush the eggs around in the bag (you'll see some very yellow uncooked yolk in the center of the eggs in the bag) and drop it back into the water for another five minutes, or however long it takes for the eggs to set.

The Results

The first time I tried this, there was a bit too much of the super-loose egg for my taste, so I decided to cook the eggs longer the next time. Then I decided I wanted the eggs a little firmer, too, so I increased the temperature.

Honestly, I'm still fiddling with this. It's not that the recipe is bad, it's just that everyone's taste in eggs is a little different. I think for me, the sweet spot will be somewhere around 171 degrees. Maybe 170. See, it's not that much different from his favorite temperature, but it does make a difference when cooking something like eggs where they can go from custard to curd in the blink of an eye.

As for the book, there are some recipes here than I'm pretty sure I'll make, a lot that I will use as inspiration or that I'll make one component but not the whole shebang, and then a bunch more that I'll probably try as-is.
Yum