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Harold McGee Lecture Series: Day 1 – Eggs

November 30th, 2009

We hope that everyone had a lovely Thanksgiving holiday.  We are cooking up lots of fabulous posts for the holiday season, from gift ideas to easy, impressive hors d’ouvres.  But for now, I want to finish up my recap of the Harold McGee Lecture Series at the French Culinary Institute.

It seems natural that Day 1 of the series started with eggs. We looked at several tests to show the perfect method of cooking eggs which demonstrated that just a single degree can make a big difference in the end results.

The eggs below were cooked in a thermal immersion circulator, (aka sous vide) which happens to be Nils Noren and Dave Arnold’s preferred method of cooking just about anything. The application here is really endless but for restaurants chefs, it makes Eggs Benedict so much easier and certainly more consistent.

The dishes that Nils Noren created to demonstrate the different cooking techniques were nothing less then shear genius.  My favorite was the dish below, egg on egg on egg. The star being the egg "biscuit" which is made in  the pressure cooker. Click here to be wowed by the recipe which was discovered by accident.

  Egg on Egg on Egg!

The other dishes were also a testament to his unique palate and skill. The dish below was an egg that had been preserved in lye for 8 days. Nils served it with shaved shitake mushrooms and the flavors potentiated each other perfectly.

The last dish was a "1000 year old" quail egg with a sliver of Lutefisk, again complementary flavors and a textural dance.

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