Will It Be Sous Vide? Large Scrambled Eggs in Large Sizes
Hello everyone, and welcome back to yet another hot and vibrantWill It Sous Vide? , a weekly column in which you tell me what to cook on my Anova precision cooker .
This week’s topic is what I’ve been doing before here at Lifehacker , but we’re going to dive a little deeper and see how far we can take it.
Scrambled eggs Sous vide has been discussed before, but only on a small scale, only three eggs at a time. Based on my previous “work,” I knew Heston’s Sous Vide scrambled eggs produced the tastiest scrambled eggs I have ever had the pleasure of eating, but as respected commentator Scott Jensen pointed out, this method would be especially valuable if it could be scaled. to feed the crowd.
I rarely have more than one person for breakfast at a time, but if you find yourself needing to feed the crowd for a brunch – say for a morning baby shower or the morning after an orgy – I can cook a couple dozen perfectly mixed tender creamy eggs – that’s a good skill to have in your culinary arsenal. To see if this could be done, I bought a bunch of eggs (and a fair amount of dairy) and lit the faithful Anova.
The original recipe is for six eggs and instructs you to divide the egg / milk / cream / butter mixture between two zippered bags, but I wanted to see if this could be done in one large bag and how it would affect the cooking time, texture, and flavor of the eggs.
I made three batches of egg mixture: a batch containing six eggs, a batch containing twelve, and a batch containing twenty-four damn chicken eggs. I scaled the other ingredients appropriately (milk, cream, and ghee) and mixed everything together. I then collected them in bags and threw them into a constant temperature water bath set at 75 ℃, pulling them out and squeezing them every five minutes or so to effectively “mix” them. Unfortunately, the temperature did not stay constant as the sudden addition of 42 cold eggs, cream and milk cooled the water a few degrees.
It took about twenty minutes for the water to rise back to 75 ℃ and the eggs just dangled, all liquid until then. As soon as the temperature returned, the magic began to happen. As you would expect, the smallest batch started to form curd the fastest, finishing in half an hour. (So, ten minutes after the bath temperature returned to temperature.)
Just like the first time I cooked these eggs, they were flawless. They were creamy and creamy and juicy, practically asking to be scooped up on a thick crunchy toast. However, I didn’t have time for toast as I still had a lot of egg bags to crush. (As for the cheese, they are unnecessary as they are already very creamy. If you just need to add more dairy, choose something salty and hard and grate it right over the eggs just before serving, perhaps with a little fresh garlic.)
The next was the “average” batch of 12 eggs (surprise!), Which accelerated in 40 minutes. There were no big differences between batches, at least in terms of taste, although I noticed a slightly larger curd and also more “white pieces” distributed throughout the fight. However, this is not so important, and I would not be able to tell the difference in a blind taste test.
Finally, the big boy started to form tasty little curds, but I wasn’t sure if the finger-crush method was mixing the eggs properly and cooking them evenly, so I opened the bag and stirred them a little with a silicone spatula before returning them to the bath. (I was also concerned that I was overloading the bag with repeated crushing, and did not want a repeat of the Great Cheesecake Disaster of 2016. ) Five minutes later, I took them off again and quickly stirred again before leaning on. bag back for the last five minutes.
Like the two batches before this mega batch, these eggs were excellent. They were what they were supposed to be: velvety and sweet with cream (mostly) tiny, yolk-rich curd. As with the middle batch, there were some large curds, but not enough to change this delicious egg-eating experience.
So back to our main question: will there be large batches of scrambled eggs?
Answer : damn it, but it will take a little longer. A batch of three eggs takes 15 minutes, a batch of six eggs takes 30 minutes, a dozen eggs take 40 minutes, and two dozen takes a total of 50 minutes. This can also change depending on how much your water bath drops, when you first submerge the egg mixture in water, and how long it takes for the temperature to return to 75 ℃. I used my largest water bath, so it took a full twenty minutes, but with a smaller bath it would be less.
All in all, you can make two dozen perfectly beaten, super-creamy and delicious eggs at the same time in less than an hour, which should make your brunch guests extremely happy and very impressed.