Fun with itty bitty birdie...eggs

I'd mentioned a few egg-related dishes in my post about Easter dinner. After a lovely lunch at Spoon Thai last Friday, I'd headed over to Argyle and picked up a couple packages of quail eggs for Easter uses. First, I copied an idea from Epicurious, but had previously decided that a chocolate chicken egg was just too much chocolate to eat at one sitting, so I resolved to use quail eggs. I started this project thinking that quail eggs are basically just small chicken eggs, realizing along the way that this was true in every way except the shell. Mother quails have decided to protect their babies by encasing them in a paper-thin shell that surrounds a membrane with the resilience of a condom.

I found that it was possible to blow the contents out of a quail egg in the same way one does with a chicken egg - but you have to make bigger holes and blow very gently or the shell will collapse. I carefully poked holes in the two points of the egg with a needle, making a circular series of perforations to remove a round section. I then perforated the yolk with the needle before very gently blowing out the contents (for reference, it's about 5 quail eggs to 1 chicken egg; I added the 10 in this project to the batter of a raspberry clafoutis I made for breakfast) I then boiled the empty eggshells to sterilize them, overturning a small saucer over the eggs to make sure they were fully submerged. They then were put back in the egg carton lined with a paper towel to drain. Because of the membrane, even shells that were crushed slightly bounced back into shape.



I melted together a 60% Cocoa Lindt bar and a 60% Perugina bar in the microwave and was rewarded with a rich, dark, runny chocolate that had the best qualities of both: the bitterness and silky texture of the Lindt, and the nuance of the Perugina (I think I tasted some cinnamon?) I poured them into a ziploc freezer bag and cut the tiniest bit off the corner. I taped over the top holes of the quail eggs (the pointy ones) and slightly enlarged the bottom hole - here's where the mottled color helps you, who knows if it's chocolate or just another blotch.



I chilled them in the refrigerator overnight, then arranged them on a bed of chocolate shavings and shapes I'd made with the leftover chocolate (I'd guess I used about half in the 10 eggs, but it was a lot easier to have extra in the bag) and told the kids it was an Easter Bunny nest.



Unfortunately, due to Mother Quail's protective membrane, getting the chocolate out of the egg was another matter entirely. It was made a bit easier by putting the eggs in the freezer - room-temperature chocolate melted during the peeling process, making it very messy and slippery.



For Easter itself, I made a simple version of a Frisee and lardons salad, subbing poached quail eggs for the traditional chicken egg. Again, the membrane made poaching the eggs a real chore, but I developed this system: set Chinese soup spoon on the counter. Crack the eggshell against a relatively sharp edge, like a glass or my frying pan. Snip the membrane under your crack shallowly with kitchen shears, being careful to avoid piercing the yolk. Drop egg into spoon, lower spoon into simmering vinagered and salted water and gently slip egg out (I used a small, non-stick frying pan) Flip the egg over after the bottom cooks and remove with a fork or slotted spoon to icewater, or serve immediately. Refrigerate in an ice bath, rewarm in simmering water. I really enjoyed this salad, which became more about the greens due to the small size of the eggs.

Mhays-

I've asked once before and I'll ask again: will you adopt me? Both the eggs and salad sound fantastic!

-The GP

If I hadn't just finished the chocolate eggs myself, I'd have invited you up!

I've always used a cigar-cutter to deal with quail eggs when i've worked with them in restaurants. you just whack off the top part of the shell, guillotine-style.

i think they make a special tool for opening quail eggs, but the cigar-cutter is more widely available and probably cheaper.

Wow,very impressive & admirable!

This year, we decided to do a version of Pucca's Tea Leaf Eggs - but with different, natural colors. We dyed our eggs using foodstuffs from around the house: onion skins, red cabbage, beets, turmeric, annato, raspberry juice (I realize now that I should have tried one with red wine!) and after an overnight soak, we had standard colored eggs, but we also cracked a few all over and made that beautiful marble pattern on the actual eggs in a rainbow of colors. I posted the whole process here on my blog, but here are the results:

Beautiful! I love the pale colors and the marbling.

You could try matcha tea for the green eggs. It colored my macarons quite nicely.

Very cool and pretty! How did the eggs taste? Did they soak long enough to take on some of the flavor of what you used for coloring? I'll have to add your blog to my google reader! Congrats on the new blog!

Thanks, Pucca! Near as I can tell, they did not take on flavor (as you can see, they barely took on color.) However, I didn't do them like traditional tea eggs - we soaked them in cold solution in the fridge overnight, instead of boiling them in it; I was afraid of overcooking the eggs.

I was thinking, though - wouldn't it be fun to do traditionally-spiced tea eggs with other liquids like, say, red wine instead of tea? I didn't use Red Zinger tea either, suggested by Healthy Schools on their blog (mostly because I didn't have any.) I assume the coloring agent there is hibiscus, and I could see where you might make a brighter-flavor-profile seasoned tea-egg based on that. I think that will be the plan for next year - I think it would make for a beautiful bowl - regular tea eggs with all kinds of other tea eggs in all colors and flavors.

As for green dye, thanks, tgoddess, for the matcha idea - of course! (I really need to get some; it does seem to come up in baking a lot) LAZ also mentioned a spinach-based green vegetable dye. Apparently you can also get the blue (cabbage) eggs to turn green if you start with a brown egg.