The Good Egg

By Maura Alice

There are literally dozens of ways to eat and enjoy an egg. One way is to hard-boil it. With Easter around the corner, knowing how to cook a hard-boiled egg is essential to successful decorating. To boil an egg: place half a dozen eggs in a medium saucepan with a lid. Cover with water and bring the water to a boil.  Reduce heat to simmer and cook, covered, for 15 minutes. Chill in cool water, and peel under cool water when ready to eat, decorated or not.

Traditionally, to color Easter eggs mix 20 drops of each food coloring with 1 teaspoon of white vinegar and a half-cup of boiling water, immerse the entire egg in the water mix, and stir gently with slotted spoon until it is the desired color. Use a crayon or candle to create a batik, negative space effect on the egg. Less traditionally, buy some cheap, white shaving cream, spread it out on a cookie sheet, dribble food coloring across the surface of the cream, use a toothpick to swirl the colors in the shaving cream, take a dried, cooled, hard boiled egg, and roll it around in the cream.

Some people blow-out the egg with pin-pricks at either end before coloring, so there’s no potential for eating a rotten hard-boiled Easter egg that’s been left under a bush or in a flower pot for too long. My daughter Catherine has made lovely, wax-resist Ukrainian eggs. That is an art unto itself, and a beautiful way to use an egg.

The remaining blown-egg matter can be used in lots of ways like in a quiche or a frittata, or in fancy sauces. Savory eggs can be baked, broiled, boiled, fried, and poached; eaten any time of the day or night; used in salads, sauces or eaten hard-boiled right out of the shell.

Personally, I prefer a poached egg to any other type. French chefs poach their eggs with a little bit of vinegar and then rinse in cool water. It may seem weird to eat cold poached eggs as a main dish, but not when they’re smothered in hot Hollandaise sauce (made with eggs). Or green chili.  The McHuevo’s (eggs covered in red salsa or green chili, veggies, and cheese sitting on a pile of crispy hash browned potatoes, and served with a handmade tortilla) is absolutely my favorite egg dish.

Poaching eggs really is an art, and I’m a quick-cook slob about it. I bring the water in a saucepan to a gentle boil, crack the egg into a shallow dish, reduce the heat to medium low, lovingly slide the egg into the water, and caress the egg from the bottom of the pan to avoid breaking the yoke. Breaking the yoke can lead to an unholy mess. Depending how you like your egg, soft or hard, will determine how long it poaches in the hot water. When it’s to your liking, remove it with a slotted spoon. For the record, poaching eggs in a microwave is just wrong, and gross. They look, smell, and taste like a rubber dog toy.

I also like poached eggs on greens for breakfast — protein and healthy vegetables to start the day.  A mac and cheese alternative comfort food is packaged ramen noodles (organic, not the kind made with Styrofoam) prepared with a poached egg, grated cheddar cheese and diced scallions. I poach the egg in the soup with the noodles.

Growing up Catholic, eggs were a staple on meatless Fridays. We had many fried egg sandwiches on white bread with ketchup. Sometimes we added fried Spam, but not on Friday. A kind and tolerant woman, Clara, who helped my mother corral the mess made by her six kids, made egg salad by mashing the boiled eggs with a fork and then adding mayonnaise (made with eggs) and minced celery. My brother Michael dreams about that egg salad, scooped from the bowl with a Triscuit cracker or a Frito chip, or maybe rolled inside a Kraft plastic-wrapped American cheese slice.

My brother Brian eats his egg salad sandwiches with sliced green olives. A neighborhood deli adds hot sauce, avocado, Swiss cheese, and bacon to its egg salad sandwich. A bit over the top for me, but you can’t really wreck egg salad.

You’d be pressed to find a better food pairing than bacon and eggs. My husband John makes fried eggs in butter with bacon and cheese. I use olive oil to fry my eggs because I don’t want to die young. John also makes the most delicious breakfast burritos using whatever is leftover in the fridge, and eggs.

My Dad made scrambled eggs slowly with big, sweeping folds that resulted in a light and fluffy egg cloud. My friend Mary’s younger brother Neil scrambled his eggs long and hard until they looked like pebbles. My younger brother Shaun makes fantastically gooey, cheesy eggs.

My husband’s mother coddles eggs that are gently steamed in special ceramic cups shaped like eggs. This way of cooking eggs is frightfully British (she’s Canadian). My mother had an egg poacher saucepan that came with cups in a tray. She put a dab of butter into each cup, set the water underneath the cups to boiling, and when the butter was melted, added the eggs, lowered the heat, and covered them for a few minutes to steam; they slid onto the waiting English muffins. My brother Kevin likes his eggs like that.

My niece Brigid is a vegetarian who doesn’t eat anything with parents, so she does eat eggs. My son Will is a locavore who only eats locally-sourced food. On Christmas morning he made green herb omelets with farm fresh eggs that were divine.

Most everyone likes a nice egg except my sister Brenda who had a bad runny egg incident as a child. Templeton the rat in Charlotte’s Web put his rotten egg to good use by chasing away the bad guys with its sulfurous odor, “Lucky for you I saved that egg, Charlotte,” he said.

So, are eggs rotten for you? According to the Mayo Clinic, “Chicken eggs are high in cholesterol, but the effect of egg consumption on blood cholesterol is minimal when compared with the effect of trans fats and saturated fats.” In other words, eggs are a good food unless you cook them in butter, mix them with mayonnaise, eat them with salty, fatty processed meats, or on top of hash browns, or sauce them with Hollandaise or cheese. The Mayo says most people can eat seven eggs a week without significantly increasing their risk of heart disease.

According to David Perlmutter, MD, you need cholesterol to live:

“Cholesterol is vitally important for brain function. While your brain represents about 2-3 percent of your total body weight, 25 percent of the cholesterol in your body is found in your brain where it plays important roles in such things as membrane function, acts as an antioxidant, and serves as the raw material from which we are able to make things like progesterone, estrogen, cortisol, testosterone and even vitamin D.”

Well then, is the white better for you than the yolk? Whites have more protein and less cholesterol, but the yolks contain most of the nutrients and vitamins. Eggs as a whole are loaded with high-quality proteins, vitamins, minerals, good fats and various trace nutrients. A large egg contains only 77 calories with 5 grams of fat and 6 grams of protein, and all 9 essential amino acids. Eggs are rich in iron, phosphorous, selenium and vitamins A, B12, B2 and B5 (among others).

In other countries throughout the world, eggs are left out on the counter. If the eggs have never been refrigerated they can be left out in a cool place, but once an egg is chilled, it has to stay that way. A cold egg left out at room temperature can sweat and that facilitates the growth of bacteria. Previously refrigerated eggs should not be left out more than two hours.

Eggs will last longer in the fridge provided you don’t put them in the door. The constant changes in temperature can make them go off. They should be kept near the back of the fridge, where the temperature is more constant.

How do you tell if an egg is fine to eat, or has gone bad? Just fill a bowl with cold water and place your eggs in the bowl. If they sink to the bottom and lie flat on their sides, they’re very fresh. If they’re a few weeks old but still good to eat, they’ll stand on one end at the bottom of the bowl. If they float to the surface, they’re bad eggs like Veruca Salt in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. “She was a bad egg.” -Willy Wonka.

Is there a difference between colored eggs? Other than the color, there is no difference between the shell of a white egg and a brown one. Some people make the assumption that brown eggshells are harder than white ones, but that’s not the case. Younger chickens sometimes lay harder shelled eggs, however. The color depends on the chicken that laid them.

Finally, how about eating raw eggs, like in a smoothie? My mother is horrified that she gave us raw egg breakfast shakes before sending us out the door to school. Not to worry, Betty. According to the American Egg Board, raw eggs are safe to drink, as long as they’re pasteurized. Actually, drinking raw eggs presents minimal risk of food-borne illness although raw eggs can carry salmonella. The risk of that contamination, however, is very small with only one in every 20,000 eggs carrying that particular bacterium.

It is a particular pleasure, for me, to buy a dozen eggs from the local Sustainable Settings farm. These eggs are laid by many different breeds of chickens resulting in a rainbow assortment of Easter colored eggs with yokes the color of the sun. The freshness of these eggs is so true that they can be eaten raw in one, big, delicious gulp.

Maura Alice likes to spend her free time in the kitchen. She didn’t realize how much she knew about eggs or how many memories were tied to eggs until writing this piece. Eggs are, literally, the essence of life, and serve us well, in many forms and functions. Right now, she’ll use a few to bake a cake – one more sweet way to use an egg.