You Need An Egg?… Not So Fast!

Hokkaido Sea Scallop Carpaccio. Slow-Cooked Egg. White Truffle Dressing

Gorge on the picture all you like but just to make myself clear: nothing, and I mean NOTHING, can describe how sensual the whole experience was. It was the equivalent of some drug that makes your eyelids flutter in a pre-faint state and your lips curve up ever so slightly from trying to suppress a hit of euphoria and your jaws slow down to a munching tempo of around Largo.

Words cannot describe that absurdly soft, absurdly smooth texture of the egg, how it envelops itself like a liquid snake around those succulent, wonderful scallops and how it sings with that white truffle dressing and dance with the flimsy lettuce strands as those dainty bits of chives do the backup singing.

Do you know, by the way, that the slow-cooked egg is termed by David Chang (of Momofuku) as ‘the sexy egg’? That:

‘A slow-poached egg– say, at 143°F (61°C) for 90 minutes– is that rare, perfect synthesis of greenmarket and high tech. When cracked open, the thing spills out ludicrously egg-shaped and ridiculously soft, the yolk suspended between raw and cooked, the cloudy white freed from that slight rubberiness I never knew bothered me until I had an egg without it.’

Says TIME writer Joel Stein in this article.

Have I caught your attention on the egg yet? For the more experimentally inclined, go ahead and read the paper published on Food Biophyics by César Vega and Ruben Mercadé-Prieto entiteld Culinary Biophysics: on the Nature of the 6X°C Egg (there is a free PDF download), where they explored the time-temperature combination of cooking the slow cooked egg in a more technical and less emotional way than I did… kinda like this:

(credits to Khymos blog post, image from Culinary Biophysics: on the Nature of the 6X°C Egg, fig.8, pg 158)

instead of like this:

Under the influence... (This is not, my friend, posed.)

And then there is the Truffle Parpadelle.

Smoked egg. How did, and could a poutry ovum be so glorious? It was like a damned socialite among the layers of slippery pasta and cunning mushrooms.

Truffle Pappardelle. Wild Forrest Mushrooms, Black Truffle. Smoked Organic Egg.

Incredible. Every time I taste something like this, I feel like my tastebuds stumbled upon Alice’s Wonderland in Pandora’s damned box – an amusement park where truffles bloom like cherry blossoms and drive up your nose to tap dance there.

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Introducing, lads and ladettes, my partner in gluttonous crime (glime?), F.

When ever we come together, wolfing down Ukranian crepes in East Village or slurping up raw scallops in Lan Kwai Fong, one of us would inevitably at some point, wonder out loud how odd of a duo we are.

Happy is the ladette who just got a art house job offer on the phone...

On the fields of Vassar...

(Grant Wood, American Gothic. http://www.chrisdenengelsman.nl)

I’m starting to think all these friends in initials I address here are like my secret agents.

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Gold by Harlan Goldstein, Level 2 LKF Tower 33 Wyndham Street | Lan Kwai Fong, Central, Hong Kong, China

Decor: 2/5
Service: 3/5
Taste: 5/5
Price/head: 300-600 HKD (lunch)
Five years from now, I’m going to remember: Hokkaido Sea Scallop Carpaccio with Slow-Cooked Egg and White Truffle Dressing, Truffle Pappardellem with Wild Forrest Mushrooms, Black Truffle and Smoked Organic Egg. The egg…. the egggggggggg. And also, sadly, the terrible, distasteful, gold and shiny decor. Well, more the reason to CLOSE YOUR EYES WHILE EATING. (The outside lounge area was quite decent though.)