Chicken flu has made purchasing white meat eggs so unpredictable! Costs are excessive, after which they’re decrease once more; grocery-store cabinets are naked, however simplest every so often! Are there eggs from different birds that you simply’d suggest? I’ve heard {that a} unmarried ostrich egg is huge sufficient to make an omelette for a complete circle of relatives. —Nameless, N.Y.C.
8 years in the past, within the dreamy days when chicken eggs value pennies and everybody was once glad always, I entered a fugue state and acquired an emu egg for twenty-five greenbacks at a Brooklyn Entire Meals. It was once a couple of days prior to Thanksgiving dinner, which I might be website hosting at my condominium for a dozen and a part varied relations, and I used to be in a near-manic state of prep buying groceries, refrigerator group, and oven-sequencing technique. The emu egg—a two pound, eight-inch ovoid with a sultry teal shell gently speckled in light inexperienced—gave the look of simply the best absurdist ultimate flourish for an already insane undertaking. A unmarried emu egg has the quantity of roughly a dozen of its chicken-born analogues: must I make a huge pound cake? A gallon of hollandaise? A deviled egg as giant because the Ritz? Finally, simplicity prevailed when certainly one of my cousins sensibly urged that we cling directly to the egg for brunch the day after Thanksgiving. Onerous-boiled and sliced, the egg will be the splendid measurement for a bagel topping—breakfast sandwiches made rather jurassic.
Cooking the emu egg was once a a laugh little gimmick that I may by no means do once more. Do you know that it takes about an hour and a part to hard-boil an emu egg? Do you know that, when hard-boiled, the yolk is a chartreuse-tinged chalky white? That the albumen, subjected to the similar cooking manner, isn’t opaque white however has a form of snowy, snotlike translucence? I do know these items now. It tasted effective, when we all were given previous the uncanny-valley horror of one thing that was once, and but was once now not, only a very, very massive customary egg.
I inform this tale to not put you off bearing in mind the opportunity of choice eggs however for example that egginess isn’t a universally fungible high quality, and the eggs of alternative hen species vary in tactics past quantity. I did once in a while wonder whether issues would have became out extra thrillingly with the emu egg if I’d been extra bold and long past for one thing like a comfortable scramble with cream and chives, or a dramatically tonsured comfortable boil—with a cereal bowl as an egg cup, and a complete battalion of toast infantrymen. No longer way back, motivated via nostalgia and a need for emotional redress—and, talking for your query, a need to cut back my reliance at the beleaguered white meat egg—I if truth be told regarded up the cost of emu eggs and was once surprised to be told that they’ve been tipping previous sixty greenbacks apiece! Certainly, egg costs have risen around the elegance Aves because of inflation. So I wouldn’t suggest purchasing choice eggs as any form of sensible measure—particularly now that chicken-egg costs appear to be coming down. However only for the hell of it? Indubitably.
At the moment, we’re attaining the tip of emu laying season, however the emu’s cousin, the ostrich, has a tendency to put on the hotter finish of spring and in the course of the summer season. Ostrich eggs are about two times the quantity of an emu egg, and feature a white shell; you’ll purchase one on-line presently at costs starting from fifty greenbacks to $299.99. Honestly, regardless that, I believe there’s simply as a lot drama, and a complete lot extra a laugh, to be present in cutting down. Itsy-bitsy quail eggs are adorable as all getout, with brown-speckled shells. Each and every is ready a 3rd the quantity of a white meat egg. In contrast to the eggs in their behemothic brethren, quail eggs are in lovely stable call for via eating places and different high-end establishments, so that they’re rather simple to search out. A shocking share of New York grocery retail outlets has a tendency to hold them—and now not simply the fancy-pants markets! They’ve were given them at my native!—shelved proper subsequent to the white meat eggs in transparent plastic cartons of eighteen, typically priced round 5 greenbacks. Right here, once more, the most productive transfer isn’t to fold the eggs into cake batter or whip them right into a meringue. (Are you able to consider the tedium of keeping apart out all the ones tiny yolks?) You wish to have to serve them in some way that emphasizes their foolish, marvellous little-ness. I like to boil quail eggs—prepare dinner them for roughly 3 mins, then surprise them in ice water to halt the cooking procedure, which makes them more uncomplicated to peel and preserves the tenderness of the yolk. Serve them merely sliced in part lengthwise, 1,000,000 of them on a plate—an Argos of yellow eyes—with somewhat of salt and sizzling sauce at the facet.
I’m additionally keen on duck eggs and goose eggs: those are miracles of flavorful, fatty yolks, simply findable at Asian supermarkets. Prepare dinner and consume them simply as you can a white meat egg, regardless that relying at the recipe you’re enterprise, you may to find that the flavour is just a little rounder, the colour just a little richer. The yolks are each greater and fattier than the ones of white meat eggs, making them a dream for baking (similar to the usage of higher-butterfat Ecu butter reasonably than usual American stuff). The yolks additionally make for magnificent, lusty, sunshine-yellow pasta; if you need to take a look at it out prior to you set within the paintings your self, swing via Maxi’s on Mott Side road, an unbeatable Hong Kong-style eating place that has a tendency to attract main crowds round lunchtime, and get a bowl of the duck-egg noodles in a wealthy pork-bone broth.
