Eggs

This is a book by Michel Roux titled Eggs. You should buy it through Amazon portal on Lem's.  Available used from $3.75 + $4.00 shipping and previously owned but still new from $21.00 free shipping. Get the new one that way you won't have someone else's bugger fingers smearing all over your pages.

At nineteen I realized I must comprehend eggs and then I'll be near expert on cooking generally. That was my conceit, and it did go a long way in my progression. Because eggs are used for everything. I learned to fry them and scramble them very young. My family poached eggs in a specialized pan that held triangular molds so poached eggs were shaped as triangles. And that right there is proof we had no idea what we were doing. Eggs are used in baking, brownies, cakes, pancake batters. They make soufflés and crepes. They make meringue and pudding, custards and ice cream, mousses and sauces like mayonnaise. They make pastries and glazes. They make ravioli and Easter eggs. Eggs behave as glue. As fluff. As fillings. As coatings and as wrappers. Egg are everywhere and they do everything. I've picked up the habit of putting eggs where they don't belong, on top of soups, over oatmeal, and grits. I've begun to use eggs to fortify things that are weak, like salads and fried rice, soup, and pasta for carbonara. I used whipped egg whites for Italian pistachio torrone candy.

The book is only 300 pages so you can read it in one night.

It helped me become a more elegant eloquent cook.

For example, I learned with poached eggs the vinegar suspended in hot water causes the whites to tighten, it prevents the whites from spreading throughout the water. But there is still a lot of extra white hanging onto the yolk. The whole point of a poached egg is the yolk. The cook lifts out the egg with a spoon so it sits in there like a nest and uses the edge of the spoon against the inside of the pot to trim the white around the spoon. The spoon becomes its own knife trimming off extra white. The extra white drops into the water. The yolk with a nice little crewcut of white is lifted onto the plate, or the toasted bagel or into cold water to hold. The cook can prepare dozens of poached eggs in advance this way and reheat them by lifting out of cold water into hot water again to warm them back up. You can amaze the heck out of your friends and acquaintances, stun them actually, by pulling off a brunch of Eggs Benedict for twenty people apparently effortlessly. They'll be all, what? What? How did this dummkopf even do that?

If you enlist a guest who asks you to allow them to help, they'll be dumbfound with your technique, impressed with your teaching éclat and awestruck with your serene equanimity in a situation that would have them pulling their hair out from stress. It happens.

What will you learn from this book? I do not know. You'll certainly have review of all of the basics.

Here is the table of contents.

Basics
Boiled eggs
Poached eggs
Fried eggs
Scrambled eggs
Baked eggs
Omelets
Souffles
Crêpes and batters.
Egg rich pastries and Pasta
custards creams and mousses
ice creams
meringues and sponges
Sauces and dressings

You will get ideas that you never thought of and are not covered in other cookbooks or YouTube videos.  But how far can it go? Come on. You put them in water and boil to soft stage or hard stage and that's it. What more can a book on eggs say? Here's what you'll see under boiled eggs.

Simplicity is the essence of this chapter, for the egg is not only cooked in its shell, but often served in it too. It is essential to use very fresh eggs especially if they are to be soft-cooked. I have used the same technique for boiling eggs since I was eighteen, It requires neither a watch nor an egg-timer and it is infallible -- once you've tried it. I am sure you will adopt it forever. Mollet eggs make delectable appetizers. I love to add them to an arugula or dandelion salad, and when I'm in the South of France, I enjoy them in tomato nests with crunchy cucumber. Hard cooked eggs have many uses, but they must be boiled carefully to ensure that they don't become rubbery. I always cook them in barely simmering water at 158℉ to keep the texture supple. They are perfect for a quick snack or a a picnic.

(Mollet in relation with eggs means eggs similar to soft boiled but cooked only three minutes once the water starts simmering with runny yolks and soft whites. Then carefully shelled. Look, right off the bat you have a new word and you didn't even buy the book yet.)

The thing with these soft, mollet, and hard boiled eggs is the instructions assume sea-level cooking. This book does not help you with that. Up here at a mile altitude and beyond to Breckenridge, Vail, Aspen, Telluride, Keystone, Copper Mountain and the like, it's a whole different story. Like chef life on a different planet. Because water boils at well under 200℉. Professional cooks go straight out of their minds. Their potatoes just flat don't cook. You should see the chefs flouncing around in despair during cooking contests. They should know better, but they don't. I watch them at home on the television and I'm sitting here going, "I hope you lose."

"I hope all  of you lose."

"The whole lot of you, lose, lose, lose."

Not a single one of them even thinks about reaching for a pressure pot. It's so simple! What do you do when your problem is absence of air pressure? Add pressure. Of course. *exaggerated* "Duh!"

That's why I laugh at them.

Even the author of this book, Cooking for Geeks, wrote a whole chapter on eggs and covered everything scientific but neglected pressure for high altitude cooking. I emailed Jeff Potter, a very nice young man, impressively responsive, with a vast Facebook following, and told him my experience using pressure for hard boiled eggs at high altitude. He mentions pressure is used commercially for ease of peeling the eggs but did not mention the utility of pressure for high altitude. Finally, after decades of failure at peeling hard-boiled eggs I tried pressure and that works like a charm. It doesn't speed the process but it makes peeling possible without tearing them apart. The pressure denatures the membrane between the shell and the albumen. Without pressure the water never gets hot enough so that membrane toughens and fuses together the shell with the white. With pressure the eggs come flying out of the shells, sometimes leaving the shell in one piece.

The page that I wrote describing this has become a highly linked page. The author of a pressure cook book picked up on it too.

See what I mean, compared with the rest?

The same thing applies to French sponge cake, genoise. I went through dozens of trials trying various things. I followed instructions explicitly. I whipped the eggs until the cows came home and complained about me whipping eggs too long. Until I cooked the cake stovetop with pressure, boom, success. 

And I learned from that, the batter tastes a lot better raw than the cake does. The cake is mere sponge for any other syrupy flavor, with honestly nothing to recommend it. While the batter makes an excellent high level sauce that would be great with almost anything from pasta to steaks or with vegetables. 

Back to the book. 

The first chapter describes soft boiled, mollet, and hard boiled eggs, then continues with ideas and instructions on how to serve them imaginatively. An egg carton type of glazed ceramic container is shown holding in each separate cup, mini ratatouille, olives, mini croutons, capers, soft fresh herbs, grated cheese, salt and pepper. 

Then ideas to dip into soft-boiled eggs; asparagus tips, grissini (asparagus wrapped in prosciutto or ham), french fries, cheese straws, carrot sticks, brochettes of Comté or Gruyère cheese (on rosemary skewers)

Soft-cooked eggs with vanilla caramel and brioche.

Mollet eggs with arugula and parmesan shavings.

Mollet eggs & zucchini tarts with spinach sabayon. 

Mollet eggs in tomato nests with crunchy cucumber.

Mollet eggs on crabmeat & celeriac julienne. 

Hard-cooked egg & smoked ell ciabatta sandwich.

Mini Scotch eggs. (using quail eggs)

Hard-cooked eggs stuffed with mussels.

Herb salad with hand cooked eggs & tuna brochettes.

The photography is outstanding.

That's it for the first chapter. Then on to poached eggs with an equal number of great ideas and splendid photographs to fire up your imagination.