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In a city as gustatorially-inclined as San Francisco, you can find all sorts of complex options for breakfast, glazes of sugars and syrups and pastries, fresh fruits, complicated brunch buffets of cheeses and mimosas and sausages. I love all these options, though when I dine out, I gravitate towards any thing based on french toast or pancakes. Comfort food is perfect for breakfast, especially when one reads the paper or listens to NPR and hears all the bad news in the world, which is important, yes, but which isn't as much fun as eating something drenched in maple syrup. Sometimes the world just needs maple syrup.
But with all the options for tasty-yet pricy-breakfasts, it is sometimes easy to forget about simply scrambling some eggs at home. Eggs, bagels, coffee, orange juice, and the paper? Hard to beat that.
It occurs to me this morning that the expression "You can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs" is essentially ridiculous, a bad metaphor. Eggs are intended to be broken. That's the whole reason for gathering eggs, at least until our economy collapses entirely and we revert to an egg-based currency. Therefore, breaking eggs is not a good metaphor for the value of sacrifice.
I had no idea that eggs were such a complicated topic, though, with all sorts of breeds producing different colored eggs of different sizes. We bought two dozen such eggs from a forester from Sonoma County last week, good organic eggs at a third of the price we have seen for eggs of similar quality on Cortland.
Other chicken-related facts and trivia we learned:
1) Roosters are intended to lead the hens to food, and to hurl themselves in the path of bobcats, for instance, like Leonidas and the 300 Spartans from the historical battle of Thermopylae--not the movie. Now there is a good egg-related example of sacrifice.
2) A friend of the forester's has a retirement home for chickens down by Santa Cruz. Brilliant.
Scrambling eggs is a fascinating process. I never really paid attention to it before, but it is kind of neat how the mixture of yolk and milk quickly coalesces into the fluffy piles of scrambled eggs we know and love once you pour it into a frying pan with melted butter. It is also fascinating how you can affect the color by the amount of milk you use and the type of egg.
Do you have any favorite tricks or additions to scrambled eggs? Do you prefer omelettes? Do you find it acceptable to cry over spilt milk?
6 comments:
I once read that the scrambles will be fluffier if you add no milk, only a bit of water. I still do it that way, contrary to Nicolas who swears by milk. Who knows! We should have a side by side test.
Substitute cream for milk if you don't have qualms about fat. That, with a little more-than-is-strictly-necessary butter in the pan, will always produce heaven on a plate.
Excellent! Two new variations to try. Thank you, both!
Lots of heat, only a little time (we're talking under 2 minutes). And, my favorite egg-quotation:
"if it looks done in the pan, it will be overdone on the plate" ~Alton Brown
So true.
Finally, your last sentence is divine.
I disagree with Ben. Both in principle (if I am to engage in a argument, I must take up a contrary position!) and in practice. My eggs get scrambles slowly in a double-boiler, scraping only occasionally. Also, when selecting fat, I go for butter and eschew milk entirely. Lastly, a little tarragon is a nice touch.
Ben, Jeff, thank you. This is excellent, both in culinary possibilities and dramatic tension. I can see it now: the great Toronto Scrambled Egg Scramble-Off.
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