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 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 liaison 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 its 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 at 65 degrees C for one hour) with shavings of Sprout Creek Farm’s Toussaint cheese.
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