Anger Burger

Well, the neighbors are chanting again, which means it’s… Thursday morning?  What?  Though, it birthed a new theory: it’s a transcendental meditation teacher who is getting more and more students.  But it presupposes that transcendental meditation sounds really, really annoying.  Which it might.

To continue my overwhelming influence from reader Amy and my ensuing discovery of Cooking with Dog, I decided to make something that looked easy, like gyudon:

Admittedly two beefs in one week was… maybe too much.  But I knew that my resident beefaholic would be happy and I wanted to make the recipe exactly as the woman in the video makes it before I started changing things around.

I’m a habitual recipe changer.  I never make things exactly as they are supposed to be made, never. I mean, sometimes for no reason I’ll change something, just to be contrary.  But this time I bit the damn bullet.  The other part of the story is that I have heard of “onsen eggs” a few times in recipes.  Onsen means “hot spring” and refers to the way that they’d cook eggs in the springs while the people also marinated.  I always sort of scowled and thought, it’s just a soft-boiled egg, just call it a soft-boiled egg! But in the gyudon video when she cracks the egg – WHAT IS THAT?  That’s not a soft-boiled egg!  It’s all cooked but still… soft.  I DON’T GET IT.

So I made it.

I like how I couldn’t be bothered to rotate the bowl so that the chip didn’t show in the photograph.

And it was FUCKING AWESOME.  Basically you make a poached egg inside the shell.  It takes virtually no intelligence or skill, which is clearly where the appeal lies for me.  If you google making an onsen egg, you’re flooded with unnecessarily complicated methods that involve heating water to 160 degrees and then slowly raising the temp to 170 and monitoring it the whole time and I’M JUST GOING TO MCDONALDS NOW.  But on Cooking With Dog the woman pours boiling water over two room temp eggs in a small clay pot, covers them, and then retrieves them 20 minutes later.  And hers are gorgeous.

I don’t have a small clay pot, so I made a lot of boiling water and covered two eggs in a huge dutch oven, covered it, and retrieved the eggs 20 minutes later.  And guess what?  They were totally rad.  They might be too soft for some, but the egg white is, despite its texture, cooked through.  You know how boiled egg whites get that distinct egg flavor?  I know I sound silly, but bear with me.  Raw egg has almost no flavor, in particular the whites.  I detect a kind of mineral taste I suspect is just “protein”, but certainly none of the rich sulfur that makes eggs so distinct.  These onsen egg taste like a cooked egg, but do not develop the rubbery texture.  And the yolk!  Oh the yolk.  A miracle.  A singularity.  The yolk is also cooked through, but is still translucent and the texture of fine fruit preserves, silken and thick.  A more perfect egg could not have been matched with that bowl of rice and beef.  If you have any strength left in your world-weary corpse I suggest you make one for yourself this instant.