I have only eaten low quality supermarket scotch eggs with dry sausage meat, chalky yolk and rubbery egg white. While I have always enjoyed eating these substandard eggs I always knew that a freshly made scotch egg would be far better. When Dom came round the other day I witnessed him make scotch eggs and got the chance to eat them warm and fresh.
An impressive thing about Dom's scotch eggs method is that he didn't look at any recipes and just made the whole cooking method up as he went along.
To begin with I pushed Dom to keep the egg yolk runny. Dom thought he would be running before he could walk by trying to do this but eventually he relented and went about making the eggs with the aim of keeping the egg yolk runny inside. To do this he had to soft boil the eggs, cool them in ice water and then peel then shell. It's quite difficult to peel a soft boiled egg and quite a bit of the white was lost.
The eggs were then incased in sausage meat. To simplify any sausage meat making Dom just brought some Sainsbury's taste the difference sausages and squeezed the meat out of the skins into a bowl. He soon realised after squeezing that he had accidentally purchased french style Toulouse sauages which are quite stong and garlicky and probably not what a real British scotcher would normally use.
A few people did tell Dom that it would be best to roll the sausage meat out and then incase the eggs in an even layer of meat but Dom thought it best just to roughly smash the meat on to the eggs with his hands . Good for him as this meant each egg had three sausages worth of meat on them.
The final part of the scotching process was to put the breadcrumb coating on. Dom insisted on buying the bright orange unnatural looking pre made breadcrumbs for authenticity's sake. The meaty balls were double dipped in the crumbs which was a good idea as helped them stay together when cooking later.
To cook originally Dom thought he would simply fry the eggs. Unfortunately the cheap orange breadcrumbs started burning as soon they touched the oil. Therefore Dom flash fried the eggs to seal them quickly and then put them in the oven for 20 minutes to bake.
By some fluke of luck this accidental cooking method turned out to be exactly the perfect way of cooking the scotched eggs as when they were cut the sausage meat was well cooked yet moist and magically as requested the egg yolk was still runny.
Eating a freshly cooked warm scotched egg with a runny yolk is a great experience. Much better to the cold shop bought kind. The ad hoc recipie was triumphant the only downside was that the Toulouse sausage meat did make them taste a bit more garlicky than they needed to be.
