Don’t you just love snacks? When you’re that special kind of hungry that doesn’t necessarily require a full meal, not that you could be bothered to make a whole meal anyway, but you still want to stuff your face with something quick, easy and satisfying – snacks are where we usual turn. Everyone has their favourite snack as well; some prefer chocolate, some prefer crisps, in some cultures they even snack on deep fried, crispy insects to take the edge of mid-morning. Personally, my favourite is the humble scotch egg - a perfect balance of meat and egg and breadcrumb. I’d love to meet the person that came up with the idea – a crazed Scotsman with an insatiable need for protein for whom a hard boiled egg just wouldn’t cut the mustard any more:
“Agnus…Agnus! This egg is missin’ somethin’, bring me over some of tha’ meat!!”
Genius*. And so, thanks to ingenuity we now have access to a meat based snack that’s nutritious, affordable and just the right size to satisfy even the most hearty appetite. Or is it? See this is an argument I was having with an old work colleague recently. Is the standard scotch egg…big enough? No, no it isn’t. But it can’t be much bigger because of the restrictions in the size of the egg which forms its core, you couldn’t just keep adding meat until you have something twice the size, that would be ludicrous and top heavy and would spoil the delicate balance perfected by that protein hungry Scot so many years ago. To create a large scotch egg, you’d need a larger egg. Stands to reason. So that’s what we did, we bought the biggest egg we could find.
I say the biggest egg we could find, but it wasn’t in fairness. The largest edible egg (that isn’t going to kill you or make you feel nauseous for the rest of your life) is an Ostrich egg. If you live on another planet, or in America, and you don’t know what an Ostrich is, then go and look it up on the internet you lazy and uneducated cretin! Moving on. Unfortunately, due to a cruel twist of fate, I couldn’t procure an ostrich egg in time for the event to come, so I had to settle for a Rhea egg, which is still pretty fucking massive. And no, it didn’t come out of Chris Rhea’s ‘Road to Hell’, before you ask.
As you may have guessed, at this point we’d decided to charge headlong into the challenge of the large scotch egg and thought it would be ever so funny to make an absolutely massive one. And so we set to the task. I bought two rhea eggs (just in case one rolled off the table or something equally as unfortunate), 5lb of sausage meet from the local organic butcher down the road, a tub of breadcrumbs, 6 cans of premium lager and some Skittles. Although I was tempted to create the world’s first sweet/savoury/alcoholic scotch egg out of all the ingredients I’d purchased, I finally conceded that it was probably a little ambitious for our first attempt and drank the beer instead of putting it in the mixture and threw the Skittles at nearby chavs because they are wrong.
Our day began around 2pm when Dave decided to drag his still drunk from the night before arse out of bed and get to my house. We had everything we needed and we cracked on fairly sharpishly, first getting the eggs on the boil in a huge cauldron like pan. From what we’d read we figured the rhea eggs would need between 60 and 90 minutes boiling time, so they went in first. We also thought it might be an idea to have a trial run with some normal eggs seeing as we’d never attempted to make a scotch egg before, let alone the world’s biggest (not yet official). Our first attempt didn’t go well – we undercooked the eggs and when we tried to peel them they went gushing out everywhere and made a mess. We tried again, this time boiling for 12 minutes instead of 7 and this went much better. Lessen learned – boil the big ones for longer to be safe. We made scotch eggs out of the small eggs (I’d write the recipe but then I’d have to kill everyone who reads this, but I don’t know who’s read it so I’d probably have to kill everyone that uses the internet just to be sure, which might be construed as antisocial) and they went remarkably well, in fact they were the tastiest scotch eggs I’d ever eaten, possible the greatest snack I’d ever eaten. Things were looking good.
The big eggs were going to be a little trickier. We’d used a small handful of meat for the little fellas – for the big ones we’d need a pound and a half of meat. The process went: peel the shell off the eggs after cracking it with a hammer, wash the peeled egg, flatten the sausage meat into a pattie sort of thing, coat in flour, put egg on meat, roll meat around egg, coat outer layer in beaten egg, coat in breadcrumbs, cool for an hour, bake for 45 minutes, eat. The thing came out like a massive, meaty, baked football and smelled like a butcher’s dream. It took four of us to eat half of it.
The texture of the egg was remarkably similar to that of a normal egg, just that the white was a bit creamier. The yolk was exactly the same as a normal hen’s egg. If you got a good mouthful with all three combined it was, surprisingly, just like eating a normal scotch egg! The problem we found though, is that the humble scotch egg you find in deli counters and supermarkets is small for reasons beyond the size of its ingredients, its small because it creates the perfect mouthful. Its balanced and well proportioned, whereas the monster we made was just that, a monster. You had to either eat it with a knife and fork or have the mouth of a 50 year old prostitute from Leeds.
So there you have it people, the story of the massive scotch egg. It was a highly amusing idea, packed with novelty value, but when it came to finding the perfect meat and egg based snack, I think we already had it right under our noses.
Peas
*(unfortunately I’ve recently discovered that the scotch egg was in fact invented in London, at the convenience store of Fortnum and Mason in 1738, not by an angry, hungry Scot. Disappointing news but thank you anyway Wikipedia)