Scotch Eggs - Champ Style

As I have been working every Saturday since my last post, Sorry to my 5 followers that it has been so long since I have done a post. Since my last post,  I have tried the scotch eggs from The Old Dairy which are the 2nd best I have had next to The Bull and Last. All the research I did to find the best scotch eggs in London inspired me to take it up a notch. Try making them myself. Well, as you will see over the next couple paragraphs, I was somewhat successful. I would say 63% to be exact. Most importantly, I learned a couple valuable scotch egg lessons along the way. First off, my personal taste in scotch eggs is to have the great crispy exterior, really well seasoned meat, and an ooey gooey interior egg yolk. If I was taking them with me on a hike, or a picnic, I would probably want a more cooked egg than you will see. After some exhausting research (which I refreshed with a Balvenie 12, as I am also currently having), I decided to go with Heston Blumenthal's scotch egg recipe. I am not going to decifer the recipe step by step on this blog, because I am far too lazy to do that, but you can find the link here. To paraphrase, here are the ingredients.

In case you were wondering, the one thing I changed from the recipe, for all the hippies out there and my wife, I made them gluten free. The first and really the most annoying, time consuming, and purely lame part of this process was doing the eggs. Since I wanted a nice runny yolk, I had to soft boil the eggs just long enough to to be able to peel them. I nailed the cooking time on the eggs, but 45 minutes later, I had 5 of the 8 eggs I boiled peeled, with 3 in the garbage. If you have never peeled a soft boiled egg, give it a shot and for the love of god, please give me tips.

So once I finally prepped the eggs, I made the sausage mixture, and made my first mistake. I followed the recipe, which called for pork mince, and some seasonings. Unfortunately, it didn't add any kind of fat into the pork, which ended up giving me a bland, dry end product, which was definitely -20% on the final score. Luckily I did add an egg so the mixture kind of bound together. You will see a piece of cling film on the counter under the sausage. If you try making scotch eggs, please use this method, it really made wrapping them up really easy, or at least easier than not doing it this was, especially with really soft eggs.

And now the fun part.

After setting up the assembly line of flour, egg, and bread crumbs, you deep fry the eggs for a couple minutes, then place them in a preheated oven for 10 mins to finish off. Some recipes just ask for all deep fry, but I classed it up a bit. Here is the final result.

So moral of the story, I will be a pro scotch egger by the time I get back to Vancouver. Mistakes that I am going to learn from.
      1. Make a better sausage mixture, or buy sausages and use that meat. Next time I will try black pudding ones as well.
      2. I am going to boil the eggs just a minute or so longer than the recipe just to help with the peeling process, but not too long to petrify the yolk.
      3. Buy a rack for the oven. When I moved the eggs from deep fry to the bake part,  I had to cook them on a baking sheet, which made the very bottom go a touch soggy from the oil build up. The rack will prevent that.

Once I perfect these last few things, my that will be my ticket out of visual effects. Well....maybe just a side gig on weekends. Watch out farmers market, Champ's Juicy Eggs will be coming your way.
Please leave your comments and happy eating!