Wednesday, September 5, 2012

Egg on egg: genius or idiocy?

One of my long-standing conundrums has been the question of egg sauce (p188). What on earth do you serve egg sauce with? It doesn't seem to go with meat, chicken, fish, veges or pasta. I'd taken to asking people for ideas, but no-one seemed to know.


The other day the question came up when I was chatting to a friend on Facebook. After being suitably chastised for his first idea (apple), he tossed off another flippant suggestion: egg.




I narrowed my eyes at this frivolous proposal. Then my eyes widened: could it work? Egg on egg - the double whammy, as it were. Well, it was more of an idea than any I'd come up with, and whether it worked or not, trying it would still tick egg sauce off my list.


Tonight I finally got around to testing the egg-on-egg concept. Egg sauce is another of those dreaded variations on the plain white sauce recipe, so it's pretty straightforward: you melt butter, then stir in flour and cook for a minute or so. After that, you just gradually add milk, (whisking like crazy to keep it from going lumpy) season, and - in this case - stir in some chopped whites of hard-boiled egg.




Sounds easy, doesn't it? It is, really, but I found I had my hands full, what with madly stirring the sauce, peeling and chopping the eggs, and preparing the remainder of the meal. Initially I'd thought to have my sauce with plain hard-boiled egg, but since that wouldn't contrast much with the sauce, I decided to fry an egg instead, and serve it atop toast and bacon - along with the egg sauce, of course!


Having layered my toast with bacon and fried egg, I spooned over the egg sauce, and sieved the egg yolks over the top for a garnish. Last time I tried this, the eggs weren't properly boiled, and attempting to sieve the yolks just made for yolky mush all over my sieve. This time it worked perfectly, topping my eggy creation with a thick scattering of granulated yolk.




The question is, did it taste good? Actually, yes. It's a lot of egg to eat in one sitting, but it was tasty. On the other hand, is it in any way necessary to add egg sauce to your bacon and eggs? Nope. Just the egg sauce on top of the bacon would have worked well enough. I should have thought of that.

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