Egg Dishes; Humor

[cabrales]

I'd appreciate learning what egg dishes (non-dessert) sampled at a restaurant have been particularly memorable for you.

In addition, please discuss the role you see humor as playing in the composition and naming of your dishes (e.g., snail porridge). Please provide examples of ingredient/ flavor combinations that you deemed too "cute" for inclusion on your menu (if any), and discuss how you drew that line.

[Heston Blumenthal]

Hello Cabrales,

Thats a very good question.

I love eggs but find it very difficult to get on with them in the kitchen (apart from desserts).

I think that the reason is because of their interfernce with wine. The yolk particularly is very antagonistic. It coats the mouth and really accentuates acid. This as you can imagine is a dreadfull asset to a potential wine pairing.

Having said that however, I have had some fantastic egg dishes in restaurants

They have in general contained truffles! Like the soft boiled truffled egg at L'Ambroisie in Paris or the egg yolk served in the shell with a little whipped cream, chives and maple syrup at L'Arpege in Paris

We have been doing some interesting experiments with eggs-none of which are on the menu....yet!

We injected a raw egg yolk-through the shell with essential oil oof smoked bacon- and then soft-boiled it. Bacon and eggs in the egg itself!

We have also tried sucking out the soft yolk from a boiled egg and injecting it with a sauce-something that we are still working on but I tohught that we could serve, instead of eggs in red wine, red wine in egg!

The subject of menu speak is a very intersting one.

The snail porrige idea stemmed from a visit to New York by my head chef Garrey Dawson.

On his return, he told me that he had been in a chinese restaurant and seen fish porrige on the menu.

Although I realised that this actually meant fish "congee" and not porrige, we were working with snails at the time and it got me thinking.

Porrige is savoury and not sweet, in addition to this, snals are purged over oats.

The porrige neede to be only just cooked so that it would have almost a slight chalkiness in the centre-much like a risotto

This was then the inspiration for the dish. I then thought long and hard about the wording and although I realised that snail porrige does not sound the most appetising of dishes, it was exactly that, snail porrige!

In terms of flavour combinations, we do "live" with some of the ideas for quite some time before putting them on the menu. I think that this is quite important as only then can you start to draw a line between something that is ready to go on the menu and something that is not.

I spent a couple of days in the labs of a flavour company that we have been working with in Geneva.

Walking past the gel lab I noticed that the sign at the side of the entrance said "Laboratory for edible soft matter"... I did think, only for a second or two, that this could be an interesting term on the menu but then decided that I needed to draw the line somewhere!