That’s Eggscellent
Seminars@Hadley
That’s Eggscellent
Presented by
Patti Jacobsen
Lynn Sorge
Moderated by
Dawn Turco
March 5, 2015
Dawn Turco
Welcome to today’s seminar at Hadley that we’ve entitled That’s Eggscellent, and today we are talking everything we can think about related to eggs and as we planned today’s seminar, there’s a lot to cover but I want to kind of stop for a moment before I bring on our presenters and see if this brings back any memories for those of you out there. Let me just play you a little snippet of something. [You should wake up to eggs each day, and then you’ll be on your way with so much energy for your whole family. When you’ve got real big test that you want to be your best, the incredible edible egg. USDA has made the call. Eggs have 14 percent less cholesterol and 64 percent more Vitamin D than they previously thought you see, and we just barely got those lines with the percentages to rhyme, the incredible edible egg.]
That goes on just a little bit more, but does that remind you of anything, folks, especially those of us who remember the ‘70’s and that jingle which has not been modernized. It did make me laugh because it brought back kind of some nostalgia from the ‘70s, but that is from the Incredible Edible Egg website so if – and they actually allow you to have a ringtone in the [inaudible 0:01:44] which personally, I don’t want that playing every time my phone rings but if you do, you can go there.
Again, this is Dawn Turco and I am moderating today’s seminar on eggs. Joining me are Patti Jacobsen and Lynn Sorge and the three of us you may know if you’re repeat participants. We do the seminars quite often related to cooking and food. Yes, we are foodies and we are home cooks and we enjoy organizing and presenting these seminars, and so we’re going to take you down a road all about eggs today. We think it’s going to be fun and informative. When you think about it, the incredible egg can be prepared in so many ways, so many eggscellent ways I might add. You can fry them. You can scramble, bake, hard-boil, poach, microwave. Yes, you can microwave eggs and on top of that, they’re nutritious, readily available and are reasonably priced. So we’re liking the egg today.
Today we will talk about egg facts, about hard-boiling them. There are perfect ways to do that, handling eggs, egg safety. I’m going to talk about deviled eggs, one of my favorite ways to have them but getting us started today, and I will ask Lynn to do her self-introduction. Lynn is going to talk about some egg facts. So Lynn, I’m handing the microphone over to you.
Lynn Sorge
I hope I have the [inaudible 0:03:29]. If not, somebody can interrupt me. The little jingle came through perfectly and what I like about these seminars, when we do our cooking and baking seminars, is that Dawn is our moderator, but she also has lots of good cooking and baking ideas. So she chimes in all along the way. My facts will be kind of a long chat to get us started but then after that, we’ll probably bounce back and forth a little bit.
Chicken eggs come in more colors than white and brown. Now I didn’t know that for a while, except that I was a little farm kid when I grew up. So the different breeds of chickens produced different colors of eggs. So in besides the white and brown ones, you can get blue, blue-green, reddish brown or even speckled and I’m not talking about the malted milk ball ones for Easter. These are the real thing. A great place to try to find these is at a local farmers market, and the color of the shell does not relate at all to nutrient, flavor, quality, cooking characteristics.
White-shelled eggs are produced by hens with white feathers and white ear lobes. Brown-shelled eggs are produced by hens with red feathers and red ear lobes. Now I can’t imagine going around checking out chicken’s ear lobes, but that’s what these facts told me. Brown egg-laying hens usually are slightly larger and require more food, and so that’s why sometimes brown eggs are a bit more pricy than the others. Hens aren’t the only birds that lay edible eggs. You can – duck eggs, quail, emu, goose and ostrich. They all are edible.
You can use water to easily tell the age of an egg and I do this a lot. If you have eggs and you think well, when did I buy those eggs? And you don’t have somebody there to read you any note about it, you fill a bowl with enough water to cover the eggs with about an inch of water and you put them in the bowl. If an egg sticks to the bottom it’s fresh. If it floats to the top it’s not and this happens because as an egg gets older, it develops a larger and larger air pocket in its shell. So it’s actually better to use a less fresh egg if you’re hard-boiling it because in fresh eggs, the white adheres closer to the shell, making it a bit more hard to peel the egg.
If you can’t remember, which does happen to all of us now and then, if an egg is fresh or hard-boiled, now I would do this on perhaps a cafeteria tray on my counter, rather than just the counter. You spin the egg. If it wobbles it’s raw. If it spins easily it’s hard-boiled. However if it goes wobbling off I would prefer it on a tray, rather than it might go wobbling off on a new counter or kitchen floor. Eggs contain like, Dawn was saying, all the essential minerals, vitamins and stuff, except Vitamin C and [inaudible 0:07:18]. Egg yolks are one of the few foods, and we’ll talk quite a bit about this today, that naturally contain Vitamin D as in Dog. Eggs also contain various things for helping the body, something called choline, and that helps with brain development and things like that.
So there are many, many things that will help within eggs. It’s not the stuff. They have more nutrients sometimes than some of our veggies we hear about, spinach and other green vegetables. A whole egg is about three tablespoons worth of liquid. The egg yolk measures about one tablespoon of liquid. Older hens tend to lay bigger eggs, but double-yolked eggs are produced by younger ones whose egg production cycles aren’t quite yet synchronized. They’re – I think this is interesting. There are about 70 calories in an uncooked egg and 77 in a cooked egg because you’re usually going to cook it in a little oil or something like that. China produces the most eggs at about 160 billion per year. In the U.S., about 280 million eggs produce more than 65 – I lost my place. Oh, that – there’s nothing you can do.
So we produce less eggs than China and a hen can lay about 250 eggs per year. I always think that’s interesting to think oh, my goodness, when you’re a little girl on the farm you go out in the chicken house and you know they’re in the nest boxes or in places, and you get those fresh eggs and bring them in and there’s nothing like it. Linda Perry was saying before this seminar began, she could smell somebody cooking bacon and eggs and such. Oh, that’s a lovely smell in the morning. Now I am going to send this off to Patti.
Patti Jacobsen
Good morning, everybody. I was hoping that I was able to hold down the microphone so I could read with one hand and hold the microphone with the other and not have to worry about holding the control key down. I need three hands to do this. Anyway, I am going to talk about the functions of eggs. Now you think an egg is an egg is an egg and boy, they do a lot of different things within recipes, like being emulsifying agents to keep oil suspended in water-based liquids, in foods such as mayonnaise and hollandaise sauce or as foams to add air and give structure to foods like sauce and hard meringues, angel food cake and sponge cake and soufflés and puffy omelets. That’s what I wish I had right now.
As a thickening agent, this is helping in thickening sauces, custards and puddings. As binding agents, so we all know that, well, maybe we don’t all know but you put in egg in meatloaf to hold it together and things like croquettes. As interfering agents and what these do, they interfere with the formation of ice crystals in things like ice cream and other frozen desserts, and then eggs also add structure to baked products such as muffins and cakes. They add important nutrients and just to review a little bit, Lynn has mentioned some of this, but they contain all of the essential amino acids, as well as thiamin, riboflavin, iron, phosphorous and Vitamins A and D as Dog and then another function of adding eggs is to add flavor and color to foods, excuse me, such as custards, puddings and cakes. So there will be a quiz later. No, not really. [laughs]
Another thing that I wanted to talk about is hard-boiling eggs. We all have – I think everybody has a favorite method for hard-boiling eggs and I learned it from my mom and I figure moms know, and so what I do is get a pan that will hold six cold, fresh eggs, maybe not too fresh, maybe about a week old because they peel easier when they’re about a week old. Anyway, put six eggs in a pan. Cover them with cold water and then I turn it on high and I don’t let it boil. I wait until the eggs start kind of jumping around in the pan. They’ll kind of go dah dah dah dah dah dah dah and they’ll kind of vibrate and you can feel the handle and you can feel them vibrate, and that’s when I turn them down to medium and all of this is uncovered by the way and I let it simmer for about twenty-six or seven minutes for six eggs and maybe twenty-two minutes for three eggs, and then I turn it up to high and let it boil.
Oh, I let it boil for about two to three minutes and that hardens the membranes of the eggs a little bit, and it will ultimately make it easier to peel and then after I’ve boiled the eggs, I take them over to the sink and immediately run them under ice cold water, and then you can start peeling them right away. So Lynn, what’s your method?
Lynn Sorge
I think this is so interesting because we all three do it a little differently, and the one I bet you just won’t believe is Dawn. Mine is somewhat different than Patti and I learned it from my mom, too. So I think there are a lot of egg-boiling moms out there. I always put them in a single layer in the pan. So what I do is, if I use a three-quart sauce pan and I want quite a few eggs, I just get as many in there as I can or you know fewer than a two-quart. So then I fill it maybe oh, three quarters of an inch above the eggs, and that’s where you’ll see if you’ve got a really older egg because it might pop up a little bit. I give a good shake of salt into the cold water. Why? Because I don’t know. Some wise tale says it peels them easier so I do it. Then I put it on the stove, put it in high just like Patti does, but mine is covered the entire time. I cover them up, let them rattle around and get a good boil going, really good boil.
So it’s on high and you put it – but you have to watch them because if you don’t, you can boil them over, so if you’ve got a cover on them. So just watch them when they’re rattling around and you know they’re really boiling. I turn off the heat and I let them sit for 22 minutes. I mean you can let them sit for 20. I think it’ll do about the same thing. Then I take them immediately to the sink, lift the lid, making sure to lift it so that the heat is going away from me and pour ice cold water, you know run it over them, fill the pan to the very tippy top, then wait about a minute or two, drain them, fill it with cold water again, and I do that about three or four times, letting the water warm up a bit and then putting cold over it.
Then I, just because I’m you know not wanting to mess around, I put them in my drainer and because they’re still a little warm, within a minute or two, they’ve dried. So then I just put them in a nice bowl or whatever I’m going to into my refrigerator and here’s where I use a little tip. I have cardboard egg cartons and one Styrofoam one in my fridge. So I put any boiled eggs in the Styrofoam one, and that way I know for certain sure and I don’t have to spin it or do anything like that and anything in that Styrofoam box is boiled, hard-boiled. So that’s my method and now you get to hear Dawn.
Patti Jacobsen
Lynn, before we go to Dawn, I just have a question. When you boil your eggs, do they crack because that’s why I don’t boil eggs, and that’s why my mom told me not to boil eggs because they might crack and then the egg kind of poofs down in between the cracks, and then you have a ruined hard-boiled egg.
Lynn Sorge
Actually, once in a while, I would say, every perhaps fourth time that I boil eggs, one might crack but I don’t waste it. I just let it cool down and take that part off and use the rest but it doesn’t happen very often and that’s why it’s better to watch them. Don’t let them go rattling and banging around in the pan for a long, long time. Just get them to a good boil but yes, every now and then one will crack.
Dawn Turco
Well, here we go and oh, Jeannette mentioned her method in the text messaging. So you’ll have to take a read, folks, where she’s doing a let it sit method as well, a variation of that and I’ll be honest with you. I do the let it sit method, too when we were talking in prep. You know my way, once it came to a boil, lid is on, I’d turn the heat off and then I set my timer for 15 minutes. So I find that 15 minutes does it and then you take them to the cold bath, and then actually once I get the water in the pan, the cold water, I actually throw some ice cubes on top, too but the method that was being referred to before and the Food Network. Yes, the Food Network, Jeannette.
This one came up not long ago and I’ll be honest. I have never heard of doing it this way and basically, the method is in the oven, no water involved whatsoever. You preheat the oven to 325. You place the eggs in a muffin tin. That sounds kind of brilliant when you think about it and each muffin spot gets an egg, and you bake them for 25 to 30 minutes and when you bring them out, then you take them to the cold water bath and let them cool after that. So that was completely new to me, and I think there are newfangled ways of cooking that have evolved over time and so I’ll be honest. I haven’t tried that one yet, but I think as I get closer to Easter and I have a lot of eggs to deal with I think I’m going to give that one a go. So those are the many ways and there are more [laughs] if you look online.