On the thread about eggs Bennie, there were several ways to cook the eggs, and this got me thinking about all the ways I prepare eggs. It is said that a chef’s toque has 100 pleats, symbolizing 100 ways to cook eggs. I can easily get to 100 if I start adding dishes in which an egg is used, but simply listing ways to cook eggs is more challenging, especially if you do not differentiate based on degree of doneness. Here is my start on 100. Additions are invited:
fried, sunny side up
fried, over
fried, basted
fried, steamed (the lower calorie alternative to basted and a personal favorite)
scrambled soft, in a double boiler, a French favorite
scrambled in a frying pan, harder, popular in the USA
poached
Baked
shirred
coddled
French rolled omelette
puffy omelette
diner omelette, often stuffed
boiled
sous vide (never tried it and probably never will)
whipped and baked (soufflé)
That is about it for me. I think tonight I shall start Careme. I doubt my toque had 100 pleats, maybe 30. Maybe that was my problem.
I actually included the diner omelette because it is made a very distinct way that is different from the other two types of omelettes. A real diner omelette almost requires a flat top rather than a pan.
As to soft, medium, and hard boiled eggs, they are all done the same way, the difference being time. So to me they are the same cooking method.
I get it that dishes like chawanmushi or shakshuka are egg focused, but aren’t they really just baked or poached? I imagine that when this 100 ways notion was concocted, those would have been legitimately distinct ways to prepare eggs.
I may try to find out, probably by asking The Google, what the criteria were. I doubt they included raw egg in a milkshake.
Of course this was close in time to Escoffier, and his book lists approximately a bazillion recipes, differentiated chiefly by sauces and bases.
But a sunny side up egg and a fried egg are two different methods, despite the fact that the difference between them is literally one spatula flip. Your criteria are confusing to me.
I would interpret ‘a hundred ways to cook eggs’ as a hundred ways to showcase eggs as a star ingredient. So I think custards, meringues, curries, egg sandwiches, egg salads etc can all be included.
I see your point. Regardless of the level of doneness a sunny side egg is just cracked into a pan and cooked, an over egg gets flipped so that it is cooked on both sides. A basted egg has butter or the like scooped from the pan to cook the top of an egg that would otherwise be sunny side. A steamed fried egg starts as sunny side but gets a splash of water and a lid to cook the top with steam. So they are all fried and each had its unique technique.
This might all boil down to (hah!) the - by my count - five different cooking methods: bake, boil, shallow fry, deep fry, microwave. Plus whether the egg is in or out of the shell. Plus whether the egg is intact or stirred up.
I really don’t see a way to get to a hundred if the addition of non-egg ingredients doesn’t “count,” unless you get really granular, as you did with the very closely related pan frying methods.
DISCLAIMER: STATEMENT OF THE OBVIOUS COMING UP: I think to get to 100, we should remember to think in terms of ways to prepare eggs, not ways to cook them, which is an important distinction. Many of these egg dishes use the same cooking method, but the preparation yields many different results.
Three ways come to mind immediately: Shoyu tamago. That literally translates from Japanese as “soy sauce egg”, and there are many ways to combine soy sauce and eggs to get a dish. The two ways I grew up thinking about shoyu tamago, though, were a simple mix of soy sauce beaten into the eggs and scrambled (my mom and grandmother would sometimes mince up green onions to add), or the rolled omelet style that @Phoenikia enumerated at #18 (known as “log o’ tamago” at the ricepad pad). The third version of of shoyu tamago is ramen-ya style, where soft boiled eggs are marinated in a soy sauce based marinade for a few days.
I have lost count. 29 and 30? (not counting the rolled omelet that Phoe first mentioned)
My conclusion is that whatever the basis for the number of pleats in the toque, there are a handful or two of basic methods of preparation and a number well over 100 of ways to prepare them. One I rarely encounter was my grandfather’s standard, the wrecked egg. It was fried with a broken yolk and slightly mangled in the pan, but not to the point of scrambling. It was usually served with kippers. I like it in a fried egg sandwich.
Do you mean like steaming an egg by placing it whole in shallow water? I would put that in the “boiling” category, because it produces the same result as placing an egg in deep water.
Or do you mean steaming as in the prep for chawanmushi, which yes, I guess that’s it’s own thing.
