Week Thirteen: Eggs

First of all, this is a quarter of the way through the year already! It feels to me like 2024 is going by at a pace, I don’t know how you feel?

This is a very indulgent week for me. A while ago, when I was adding eggs into my basket for my online food delivery, I saw an option for ostrich eggs. I decided then that I wanted to use an ostrich egg for one ice cream, and when this week’s theme was Eggs, well… I actually got my ostrich egg from an excellent if somewhat odd farm shop that specialises in unusual meat including crocodile meat from their own crocodiles, and with some unusually good fortune for me they happened to have an ostrich egg available when I needed it. I actually got to see the ostriches it came from! I wrapped it in several bags and even seat belted it in my car, although I later read and saw demonstrated that you can stand on ostrich eggs without them breaking so it possibly would have withstood an emergency brake.

Having obtained my ostrich egg, then the decision had to be made on what to do with it. I was torn between wanting to do something really special with it, and wanting the ostrich egg to be the starring role - I’d paid £20 for this egg, what was the point of covering that up? And then it occurred to me, I was going to be making the equivalent of about two ice cream mixtures; an ostrich egg yolk weighed practically 215g, and when I plugged that into my calculator it produced enough mixture for two. So I decided to make both the plain custard to let the egg take centre stage, and one that is infused with Madagascan vanilla pods (ostriches aren’t from Madagascar but they are from Africa, so there was an albeit tenuous link there; it was mainly based on me knowing that vanilla ice cream works well rather than having to be experimental with my ostrich egg) with Mini Eggs mixed in.

I was terrified when it came to opening the ostrich egg - it’s not like I had a spare one, it had taken a while to locate this one, so if it went wrong then that would be it, finished. I watched a few videos, but they seemed to be based on keeping the shell mostly intact by blowing it and, whilst that would have been nice, I needed to separate the yolk and the white so it wasn’t an option for me. I decided to just go for it. I started by chipping with a knife but frankly it was doing nothing so I got a hammer. As you may have gathered from me knowing what the yolk weighed, my unusually good luck lasted, I got a couple of well placed cracks and managed to get the shell open, and separated the egg using my usual method of moving it between the two halves of the shell. The yolk just started to split right at the end, basically when I’d already decided I’d separated as much as possible, so I quickly got it in the bowl. And there it was, I’d opened and separated an ostrich egg.

This ice cream is, at heart, my usual base custard recipe; I used an ostrich egg because I wanted to, but you can use normal hen eggs, or you could try an exotic egg of your own interest. The recipe from the Gunter’s confectioners uses eight eggs and a pint of cream, which is 120g of egg yolk and 878.56g total weight. The vanilla pods don’t stay in the final mixture so they aren’t taken as part of the recipe formulation but rather a percentage of the total weight. 

Ingredients

922.84g single (19% butterfat) cream (58.76%)

110.41g whipping (39% butterfat) cream (7.03%)

214.53g egg yolk (13.66%)

322.74g caster sugar (20.55%)

Method

1. Put all the ingredients into a large pan.

2. Heat whilst whisking constantly to form a custard; your custard is ready once you can draw a line in the mixture on the back of a spoon. 

3. Chill the mixture for several hours, preferably overnight; for best food safety use an ice bath to cool to 20C before refrigerating.

4. Whisk just prior to churning.

5. Churn according to your ice cream machine’s instructions, stopping at a soft serve texture.

6. Put into a container and freeze for at least four hours, preferably overnight.

(To make vanilla ice cream, I cut up 1.61% of the total weight of vanilla pods into small segments about 5mm long, so in this case 12.35g because half of the mixture - the weight of one ice cream - weighed 769g. I then stirred this into the mixture and chilled it with the pod pieces still in there, straining them out before churning. However, my usual method is to press the pod pieces into the sugar using the back of a spoon before adding that to the pan and making the custard. I couldn’t do that this time because I only wanted to make half the ice cream vanilla, so this may not be as strong vanilla flavoured as my usual one - pressing the pod pieces splits them and releases more flavour along with more seeds. I also broke up some Mini Eggs and added them as a mix in towards the end of the churning process.)

These are custard ice cream and vanilla Mini Egg ice cream: I couldn’t really go wrong with these, at least not once I’d succeeded in the hard part of opening and separating the ostrich egg. Did using an ostrich egg add anything to this? It does bring a different taste, almost banana flavoured - not smack you in the face levels of banana, but something light and sweet. The texture of particularly the Mini Egg one was more ‘sticky’ than my usual version, but this may also be because of two bags of Mini Eggs… Will I do it again? I highly doubt it. It was very indulgent to do it once, but I wanted to and I did, and I’m glad I did but next time I use eggs it’ll be ones I can open by cracking them on a bowl rather than with a hammer.