Spicy Epicurean Debauchery: Faberge Lessons

Did everybody have a nice Easter? I’m not very religious, so I didn’t do much. So naturally, there weren’t any Honey Backed Ham or whatever else feasts people have on Easter Sundays.

But I do recall something I did a few years back.

My friends and I decided to take up Extreme Egg Coloring. I mean, we’re talking Faberge Imperial Eggs! Obviously, we didn’t have giant Ostrich Eggs to play with, so it was Extra Jumbo Super Large Eggs from your neighborhood grocer. Yea, we got like 3 dozens of them

With these eggs, instead of doing it the easy way, we decided that we should hallow them out, as in blow its contents out and color them empty. The easy way, naturally, will be to hard boil them. Since these eggs will be “pieces of artwork” so we didn’t want it to be hard boiled eggs (or else it’ll go bad and really stink like rotten eggs, literally).

So we got our Bedazzlers (don’t ask me why we have these handy), hot glue guns, fake plastic pearls, gold ribbons, silver ribbons, lace ribbons, over 24 different paints, patterns, brushes, and set to work.

According to one of my friends, you were supposed to make a pin-size hole at the bottom and top of the egg, and then use the pin to sort of break the yolk. Then with the force to blow your brains out, you blow air through one end and squeeeeeeeze the egg’s contents into a bowl.

After we barely blew through our first eggs, that was that for our Faberge project. We were all light headed, tired, and disappointed. So we had three (cuz one person broke his egg in the process) empty eggs to play with, and 32 hearty gigantic eggs to deal with.

Yea. Now what?

“Oooooo I want those eggs like they make in the hotel for breakfast!” one person suggested.

“Yes!! Those extra creamy scrambled eggs!!”

“yummmm!”

So it was. We have gone from Faberge to Hotel Breakfast Chefs in under half an hour.

But here, we all realized, we really didn’t know how to make those extra creamy scrambled eggs. You know the kind you get when you go to a really expensive breakfast or brunch? The kind that is so creamy, you’d think it was custard? Where the yolks are so rich it melts in your mouth, and as you enjoy the smooth texture and it’s velvety warmth, you fear your waist line? ....but you say to yourself, “well it’s not every day that I have a $14 scrambled eggs” and you wash it down with a $15 Mimosa.

So we broke all of our 32 giant eggs, and declared we should put in Heavy Cream into the mixture. I mean velvety and creamy, almost always means “lotsa fat” right?

In went the Heavy Cream. We declared one table spoon per egg should be sufficient.

After stirring it for quite some time to make sure that the yolks and whites were no longer separated, and triple making sure that the mixture was now one canary colored liquid, we also decided that we needed sufficient butter on the pan. Again, it was that velvety and creamy = lotsa fat concept working here.

So we heated up the pan, melted like enormous amounts of unsalted butter, and poured in ALL of the egg mixture. We don't like sublte, I guess...call us hardcore, even.

well….the result wasn’t creamy or velvety. It was rather gross. Even with all that fat, the eggs turned out waterly and rather dry. Despite it’s scary look, I bravely took the first bite. It was tough and it reminded me of dry sponge.

“o well, it’s only eggs” was the disappointed comment from all of us.

Well this experience made me not like making “hotel” scrambled eggs at home. I somehow decided that I'll leave creamy scrambled eggs to the realms of "hotel breakfasts". If I wanted creamy eggs, I declared that I had to go to a hotel breakfast and pay $14.

I mean, I liked the scrambled eggs of my childhood, which was just eggs with a drop of soy sauce and that was fine. The “soy sauce scrambled eggs” were just literally cooked eggs. It goes well with rice, and it also goes well as the contents of Breakfast Burritos, when made sans soy sauce.

Diners can’t make these creamy eggs for some reason. When I went to diners, I usually ordered Eggs Florentine without the Hollandaise (I hate Hollandaise) and that was fine. Spinach, Ham, English Muffin and runny poached eggs. I despised diner omelets because that too, had the strange sponge like texture, and not the creamy ones I’ve had in hotels.

Then it happened. Alton Brown happened.

In one 5 minute segment of his show, he demystified the creamy eggs. It did NOT require heavy cream, nor baths of butter. What it required was disciplined heat control!!!

DUH!!! Think custard!!!! I said to myself, as I watched the show.

Yep, custard doesn’t require much more than super low heat and egg yolks. And custard is creamy all by itself. So now I can add proudly to my Sunday home brunch repertoire, “$14 Scrambled Eggs” - o, and the "$15 Mimosa" as well.