Food Science Day 2: 5 - The Long Egg #2

AIM: To replicate the legendary LONG EGG, of GALA PIE fame

APPARATUS: many eggs (as per), tall pan, foil, cylindrical “formers”, knife, wooden skewer

INITIAL COMMENTS: the basic principle here is bound to be v close to the realactual method used in the long egg industry, but the question is can household kitchen materials replicate the cooking method as well as bespoke “long egg” boilers and clever membrane tubes…

METHOD
Clever pre-experiment bit:

• Measure the volume of a couple of eggs separated into white and yolk. so that i could work out the ratio of cross-sectional area white:yellow. this i did, and recorded. then i lost the recording.
• However the results guided my quest for two cylindrical “formers” of the right diameter – i settled on the centre of a kitchen roll, and a left over bit of shower rail.

Separate egg and yolk:

• My (small-endian) separation technique is “in shell” having knocked off a chunk of the end with a knife. A knife sounds clinical, but it does make a nice clean “shell-bit-less” way to get the white out
• I am normally pretty good at this, but on the day i managed to get white all over the table :-(
• Clear up egg white and waste another egg

Cook yellow

• Wrap 4 or 5 inches of foil around small former, twist off one end, remove former - TA DA 1x yellow cooking thing 3 inches tall.
• boil tall pan of water.
• pour yellow into foil tube and lower into simmering water and balance against side with skewer

At this point the apparatus constraint of ordinary kitchen stuff, fails me as my foil tube is taller than any pan to hand. this is not the fault of the host - this is the POINT of the experiment. However it becomes obvious right off that this is going to limit my grand scheme, for although i can look down and see the yellow cooking, and quite quickly, the top bit is still oozy. I continue cooking the yellow for FAR TOO LONG, and in desperation i try twisting the top and dropping it into the pan. A little yellow escapes into pan. But when retrieved and unwrapped it is a qualified half-way success…

Cook White

• Use larger former to make foil tube to cook white in. When twisting off the end, guide the end of the yellow into place - i left a bit of foil on the yellow with the twisted end in place for that purpose (clever, eh)

• pour white into foil around the yellow
• back in pan using skewer to balance it and keep the yellow central
• worry again that the white cooks v quickly but not at the top. try deperate “seal/twist top” and let it cook in water unsupported again. Nearly spill white everywhere making lots of white threads in the pan

Results
Actually not bad - see first pic. Ooziness at the top, as expected, which takes much more of the original length than i’m happy with, but there is definitely the making of what is clearly egg but in cylinder form. IN YOUR FACE MOTHER NATURE.

Cutting off the oozy bit it’s not bad - the result is a little over 1 egg’s worth of cylindrical egg.

HORROR on further cutting to discover WHITE BITS in the yolk. My white/yellow separation technique truly was TEH SUCK that day.

Also tiny bubbles were found between white and yellow, in some cases so bad that the white and yellow seemed to separate with little prodding.

On tasting it was pronounced rubbery

Conclusion
A sound technique, with problems to overcome

• Being less cack-handed at egg separation
• Finding the right cooking vessel. A tall pan you might cook spaghetti in could do it. awful waste of energy boiling all that water though, eh? What about one of those coffee pots? can you cook in those on a hob? How about in a kettle? (boiling bad, simmering best)
• NOT OVERCOOKING in a rubbish attempt to compensate for want of impossible cooking vessel. This definitely makes for rubberiness, and might make the air bubble thing more problematic

Also, YAY. LONG EGG!! How to make a longer one though - you can’t do this horizontally for obvious egg escaping reasons, but something tall and thin to cook in - well it’s a bit specialist innit, and the point of the exercise was to use real kitchen equipment. Can you cook in a metal wine cooler? biscuit tin?

1. FT's Pete Baran on October 23rd, 2006

   WHITE FIRST!!!!

   I did not do this and therefore am the loser, though Alan’s method was pretty impressive I still think white first makes more sense.