And so the hot spring egg continues to wreak havoc on my culinary mind. Currently this simple technique seems to have taken over restaurants. Chefs continue to work on dishes , printing times and temperatures on menus and discussing the finer points of why this egg, once merely cooked in a hot spring, is truly the right way to cook an egg. While I believe the a slow cooked egg has its merits, many of them, learning about the variety of temperatures at which egg whites and yolks cook, I have concluded that an egg cooked at 63.8 degrees celsius is just not for me. When cooked in this manner the egg is a quivering, barely set orb. When it is touched by a fork, spoon or toast point the white gives way to a molten yolk which runs everywhere. In many cases these eggs are served in broths and act as a liason for the dish. Similarly they are often seen precariously nestled within salad greens where they act as a warm dressing when punctured by the tines
of a fork. These preparations serve a purpose, I get that. I just feel the egg itself is often lost, disappearing into the many other components of the dish. To my mind, an egg should have some texture, a bit of bite, something to sink your teeth into. With that in mind we revisited the slow cooked egg. We increased the cooking temperature a bit so that the white would have a firmer texture and hold it's shape around the yolk. We have mimicked a soft boiled egg where the white is cooked to a silky, yet solid consistency while the yolk forms a rich, slightly gooey center, rather like a Cadbury creme egg. In this dish we have just topped the egg (cooked at65 degrees C for one hour) with shavings of Sprout Creek Farm's Toussaint cheese.