A Cure for What Eggs Ya

Eggs! Eggs! The Versatile Fruit! The more you eat the more you...

Uh. Well. They're more versatile than my lyric writing, okuuuurrrrrr?

I'm big into pickling, but I've never dried anything outside of herbs as a preservation method. Just by lurking on a charcuterie thread, I'd seen Cured Eggs pop up often as an easy recipe to try before dipping one's toes into the world of dried meats. So I gave them a shot!

The 2 hardest steps will be 1. Finding room in your fridge because it's tiny and you use 1/3 of it for condiments. 2. Separating the yolks from the whites with no breakage. Finding a use for the whites is easy. I made coconut macaroons!

I got some fantastically fresh eggs from the local organic store. I think one still had poop on it! Using Bon Appetit's method (but skipping the sugar), I set 5 eggs in salt. I left them in the fridge in the salt for 4 days, after which I did the final drying two ways. The first way was in a low temperature oven for a couple hours. The rest of the eggs were gently wrapped in cheesecloth and left in the fridge to dry out more slowly.  

The result is a mildly rubbery, salty egg concentrate. So far I've only used it in Rustic Canyon's Caesar Salad, but folks like to use it in carbonara and other dishes that could use a splash of eggy flavor. 

I think next time I'll add sugar to the cure, or I'll use a different kind of egg, like duck.