Wednesday, 1 February 2012

Making Heston's Dippy Scotch Egg




This is the story of how I did it.

After watching Heston Blumenthal make a dippy scotch egg on How to cook like Heston a few weeks ago I decided to have a go at making one myself. I decided it would be best to wait until after my exams had finished to give me the best chance of being successful.

So this week I got all the ingredients together and documented my attempt on twitter. I think my tweets are quite self explanatory, but I'll add some extra tips here incase you are going to have a go yourself. And I think you should. It was incredible.


Half boiling is placing the egg in cold water, bringing it to the boil then turning off the heat and leaving it for 3 minutes (full boil is leaving it for 6 minutes).


This is for about 10 minutes, to stop the egg cooking further and to cool the egg so that it is cold enough to touch.


This was step I found the hardest. The egg is only partly cooked so when I was shelling it I removed some of the egg by accident and put a big split in it. No yolk came out, so I wasn't sure if this meant I had been lucky or that the yolk was hard. I carried on but made a second one just incase. The same thing happened. It was at this point I was having doubts on how successful I was going to be.
I also found it difficult to make the sausage meat stick to the egg and not to the clingfilm when I peeled it off. I think for the best chance of success you need the optimum amount of meat to cover the whole egg but not be too thick, to not touch it too much when taking it out of the fridge so that it stays cold and use a spoon to guide the meat off the clingfilm and on to the egg. I used one sausage per egg which seemed to be about right.


I might have done this in the wrong order the first time I tried...


...but I managed to remove the coating without destroying the egg and have another go. It worked this time!

My method of creating breadcrumbs easily is by grating a frozen piece of bread. It works every time.


This was the first time I had deep fried anything and I had images of causing a small kitchen fire. My housemate obviously had the same faith in my cooking skills as I did as he came in part way through the frying stage asking me if I had started a fire yet. To the relief of us both the fire blanket wasn't needed.
Heston said to get the oil to 190 degrees, but I didn't have a cooking thermometer. Instead a 'Guestimated' when the oil was ready by dropping a crumb in, watching it get fried, then leaving the oil to heat for another 5 minutes.




By now the egg had been boiled, fired and baked and actually looked like an edible scotch egg. I was already pleased and was classing it as a success, while holding my breath for what would happen when I cut it open.


It had worked! With both eggs! And they were very tasty. I was so pleased I was grinning like a small child at Christmas while I tucked in. The two hours in the kitchen was definitely worth it.

I was then even more pleased when Channel 4 Food retweeted my photo to their 24,590 followers! Followed by a RT by studentcooking.tv to their 1000 followers. And I thought that the potential audience of 8000 for my retweeted World Cup of Chocolate tweet was going to be my biggest ever.


If you want to have a go yourself, you can find the recipe on the Channel 4 website.
And my last bit of advice: If it seems to be going wrong, keep going anyway and see what happens. It might turn out amazing.

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Location: Sheffield, South Yorkshire, UK

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