Crispy Fried Farm Eggs with Fresh Cheese, Watercress and Red-Eye Vinaigrette - Page 103

So you're working on this recipe, got your fry oil at 350F, greens, vinaigrette, cheese and mushrooms standing by...and you fry 6 eggs.  Six.  SIX!  JUST SIX?  Fry more!  These eggs were the PERFECT eggs.  Hell, I would consider throwing all the rest of the stuff away (even though the salad was delicious) and frying and eating eggs OVER and OVER!

Can you tell I liked the eggs?

The rest of the recipe was delicious too, and super easy (especially if you already have rendered ham fat).

The vinaigrette came together easy, and stayed emulsified a lot better than I expected it to based on the recipe description.  Was damn good too!  The recipe makes a lot of it, so either cut it back, or plan on having a few salads over the next couple days.  It really is the vinaigrette version of red-eye gravy.

The cheese was simple and straightforward, with the only remotely twitchy part being keeping the milk mixture at 170F for 2 minutes, which isn't that hard even on my piece of crap electric stove.  I found my thermapen to be just as easy as the fry thermometer for doing this, and more accurate.

We already had pickled mushrooms from the cookbook so used them even though they weren't chanterelles.

One piece of good advice from the recipe was dressing the salad before plating.  Pouring dressing over salad on the plate can look nice, and sometimes works, but dressing and tossing before plating usually works better, especially with a thicker dressing like this one.  We prepared everything for plating and had it staged so the eggs could go right onto the plate after frying, but we missed the dress the salad step.  This caused a slight delay from frying to eating, but it was still good.  Since there were only 5 of us, I ate the 6th egg right out of the fryer while Ox plated.  DELICIOUS!

Advice: Cut the vinaigrette recipe in half.  Have everything staged before frying the eggs, including dressing the greens.  I would fry more eggs, but, even if you just want 6, boil a couple extra.  Really fresh eggs can be troublesome to peel, so it's easy to mess one or two up.  We got lucky, but it was touch and go for a second.  Do everything except the eggs ahead of time to allow you to concentrate on the delicate part of the recipe.