Scotch Eggs are essentially picnic food from pre-refrigeration days. They can now occasionally be found in bars and they are, in my opinion, underrated. It is a hardboiled egg wrapped in sausage. The traditional recipe calls for them to be breaded and deep-fried. I just cannot deep-fry sausage and serve that to my family!
So this time I tried sauteing them and then finishing them in the oven. As you will see from the pictures, the problem with this is that the browning is not even. It also makes it hard for the breadcrumbs to stick. The result is delicious, but how the food looks is important too.
Next time I will roll them in breadcrumbs and then bake them. There’s no question deep-frying them would be great, but it adds substantially more calories and fat.
Start with hard-boiled eggs. I have a perfect recipe for them which is straight from Julia Child.
1. Put eggs in cold water, cover pan and bring to boil.
2. When water boils, kill heat and set timer for 17 minutes, leaving lid on pan.
3. At 17 minutes, transfer eggs to a bowl of ice water, turn heat on pan again.
4. After 2 minutes, put the eggs back in the boiling water again for 1 minute and then back to ice water.
This give you bright yellow yolks, easy to peel and with no green ring between yolk and white.
Peel 8 eggs, and season 2 pounds of ground sausage. I am sure there are purists who would dictate which type of sausage it must be, but I am not one of them. It’s your food after all!
Wrap the sausage around the eggs like a large meatball. Then, here is the point where I sautéed them.
Again, I would not repeat this because the results are not uniform. Instead I recommend rolling them in panko breadcrumbs and baking at 350° on a baking sheet.
It is hard for me to say how long to bake them because the thickness of the sausage can vary, the temperature of the eggs and sausage, etc. It will be approximately 20-30 minutes.
Once you start to smell the sausage in the kitchen, they will be ready in about another 10 minutes.
Let them cool, and then you can slice or quarter them. They are great as is with mustard and a cold beer, but also excellent over salad greens, or, as was traditional, on a picnic.
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There’s a restaurant downtown that does these, but soft boils the eggs so the yolk is still a little runny. A nice delicious twist! It is called Againn.
I would love that! I think of the runny egg yolk as the “lazy man’s hollandaise”! It is, however, a harder degree of difficulty because cooking the sausage without cooking the yolk in the center is very tricky.