Thickening with eggs

"Stir an egg yolk into any dish that begs for an element of thickness or creaminess. That's it." Daniel Skurnik, pastry chef/Food and Wine

You may remember that I was going to have a series on how to thicken things. And I started with bread, but then the idea sort of disappeared. Well today I remembered that and decided to do eggs.

It's a vast subject, so I decided to ignore some of the obvious things like custard, and everything you can make from custard like icecream and crèmes brulée and caramel; and its cousins crème patissière and anglaise. Then there's all those sauces related to Hollandaise and the Saboyons. Batters from fish and chips to Yorkshire pud, quiches and other savoury tarts, not to mention the whole baking sphere.

Which really means that I just didn't feel like dealing with some of those things and decided to concentrate on a few selected savoury things, some of which you will know some of which you might not.

I was going to include mayonnaise here, but here is today's new bit of knowledge:

"Mayonnaise is generally made using egg yolks. But it’s not the egg yolks that cause the thickening here. That is done by the fat droplets. However, the lecithin helps a lot in emulsifying and keeping the mayo together" - Food Crumbles

Mind you I do wonder whether it's actually the lecithin emulsifying with fats, that actually causes thickening, so it's a partnership perhaps but the egg yolks are crucial. But I'm not a scientist. I just put it out there. The most comprehensive article I found on the whys and hows was on the Food and Wine website which set me off on a minor ramble around the internet. And they also had words to say on the lecithin thing:

"egg yolks are an emulsifier, which means they contain particles similar to both water and oil and can thus also bind things with both (like vinegar and oil, for example)" Food and Wine

Which sort of implies that that is how they thicken and also make things creamy - as in the quote at the top of the page from the chef they chose to add technical nouse to the article. Basically add an egg to anything that needs to be a bit creamier and a bit thicker. He even suggested adding it to cooked breakfast cereals.

The main - and vital - thing to remember when using eggs to thicken things, however, is to be very careful about heat. Sometimes you start out cold with your egg mixed with whatever other things you are dealing with and then as the heat increases keep whisking and don't boil. However you do need heat - eggs won't thicken without heat.

A second way is to add the yolk after you have finished cooking, and after you have taken it off the heat:

"Drop a yolk into the pan or pot just after it's come off the heat, so that it's hot but not boiling. Whisk or stir quickly to break the yolk. Progressively, the residual heat will cook the yolk as you mix it into the entire dish. Once it hits around 160 degrees, it should be glossy and thick. If the radiant heat isn't doing the trick, pop the pot back over low heat and keep stirring until the yolk is cooked." Daniel Skurnik, pastry chef/Food and Wine

And the last way - as for carbonara - is to mix your egg yolk with other things if there are any, or just whisk your yolk, add a small amount of the hot liquid, whisking vigorously as you do until creamy and then add slowly back into the hot liquid - again whisking as you go.

Let's begin with soup, the most famous example of which is Greek avgolomeno soup that lemony chicken soup that once was the thing and is less talked about these days, here demonstrated by Felicity Cloake who goes into all of the ins and outs before arriving at her 'perfect' version, which uses that last method of mixing a bit of that hot soup into the egg yolk before stirring it back into the soup.

But you can do this to any soup you fancy if you think it looks just a bit watery

The only other soup that was focussed on egg yolks that I found was Chinese Egg drop soup here talked through by Bill of The Woks of Life. It's not quite the same though because it's rather an egg soup if you will - the egg is simply dropped into the hot soup and stirred, which is exactly what you are not supposed to do because of what happens - in this instance:

"the direct translation in Chinese is egg flower soup, because the egg creates large and small swirls in the soup in a flower-like pattern." Bill/The Woks of Life

The soup itself is not really thickened, it now just has another ingredient - a bit like dropping some pasta or rice, or a shredded vegetable into it.

Whilst we are not really into what I'm supposed to be talking about, and still in Asia, there are also Silky Chinese steamed eggs from Vicky Pham, which are really just another way of cooking eggs and when you cook eggs they solidify in some way. Here the method of cooking is to steam them in your serving dish over boiling water, having whisked them first with some water and seasonings. In this version the author has added chilli oil, soy sauce, spring onions. I suppose it's a kind of more anaemic omelette in some ways.

Still in Asia - in Japan - there is also Tamago kake gohan as demonstrated by J. Kenji López-Alt of Serious Eats. This is a dish of hot cooked rice, to which you add your egg yolk and stir with chopsticks until it's all creamy. Then you top with flavourings to your taste and J. Kenji López-Alt adds another egg yolk which is just broken and left to ooze into the rice. Or you can just eat the plain rice with the egg yolk stirred in without the extra toppings.

Then there is pasta - there is always pasta - and Carbonara is the prime example of the "the silky egg principle" which Rachel Roddy calls it, although nobody else seems to. In this instance you do as the picture at the top of the page shows - mix your egg yolk with cheese and whatever else you might want to add - lemon zest and juice, chilli flakes ... before stirring into your finished pasta and sauce - but off the heat - and quickly. Rachel gives us two examples: Pasta with peas, ham, eggs and cheese; and Linguine with courgettes, eggs and parmesan - which I have now made a couple of times and is absolutely delicious.

Creamy doesn't however, have to mean pale and wan and almost bland but for the cheese, it can also mean spice - and TikTok is where you will find such things - like this Creamy and spicy spaghetti with egg yolk sauce - Bread Bake Beyond, which I have to say looks very tempting to me - if it wasn't for the chilli problem in the Dearman household.

Finally two outliers. Somewhere in my internet ramble I came across the suggestion - repeated elsewhere - of using mashed hard-boiled egg yolks to thicken and cream salad dressings. Most usually this was applied to vinaigrette style sauces, but I'm guessing you could apply it to many. Indeed I even remeber that a memorable Caesar salad, made at the table with flair in a huge copper bowl in Honolulu long, long ago, used an actual egg or egg yolk in the dressing. If nothing else it gave my two, then teenage sons, a lifelong love of Caesar salad.

And last but not least - I had not thought of it - there is Lemon curd - this one from the BBC Food Team. As the introduction says, much quicker and easier to make - if you don't curdle the egg - than jam. It doesn't have to be lemon curd of course - it could be passionfruit, mango, gooseberry ...

So next time you find yourself with spare egg yolks because you're a whizz at making pavlova, give a thought to some of the things above. I'd start with the courgette carbonara.

YEARS GONE BY

November 19

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2022 - The ethics of shopping

2021 - A climatarian diet - too hard

2020 - Missing

2019 - Pecorino

2018 - Lucky dip - Pieds et paquets from Provence - uggh?

2017 - Nothing

2016 - Frying in air?