A toast to our egg preferences

My local cafe owner doesn’t ask how you like your eggs: he asks where you like them. “On your toast, or off?” he says, order book in hand. I look at him. “It’s a thing,” he explains. “Some people want the eggs to soften up their toast. Other people hate soft toast and want the eggs on the side.”

We all have a thing about eggs, whether it’s needing the egg yolk to be runny – or falling off your chair in a dead faint if it even twitches when you cut into it.

Alfred Hitchcock famously had a thing about them. “I’m frightened of eggs,” he once told a journalist. “Have you ever seen anything more revolting than an egg yolk breaking and spilling its yellow liquid?”

Swap the word “revolting” for the word “glorious”, thanks. Some people think a fried egg isn’t fried unless the white is crisply frizzled and the yolk set, which I find heinous. A fried egg should be cooked over a low heat with the lid on the pan so that there is no frizzling whatsoever, and the yolk very subtly glazes until almost opaque, while staying runny. Cloudy-side up, so to speak.

I also have a thing about hard-boiled eggs and need to cook them in a very particular manner so that I can double-slice them to make an egg-salad sandwich.

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Double-slicing, which reduces them to tiny rubble, is a technique I’ve yet to patent. First, you place your egg in the egg-slicer, bring down the guillotine and slice it, then you carefully rotate the entire egg 90 degrees in its cradle and bring down the guillotine again. Bingo, tiny dice to fold into mayonnaise with parsley, sea salt and pepper. You’re welcome.

My wife, on the other hand, cuts half the egg white off her hard-boiled egg: “It’s all about the ratio of yolk to white,” she says.

One of the reasons we might be developing more of a thing about eggs is the cost. I pay $12 a dozen for EBL (Extra Bloody Large) eggs because I believe in the quality, the taste and the farm they come from. So all my strange and pernickety little techniques are just a way to make each one count for something.