with eggs—we absorb the aroma
through our shells, resulting in a deli-
ciously mushroomy scrambled break-
fast without actually using a single
truffle. Another note on my shell: It
peels better if I’m hard-boiled a cou-
ple weeks after being laid rather than
right away. The dozen you purchase—
each laid by a different chicken, given
that it takes 24 to 36 hours for a bird
to produce a single egg—are typically
no more than a week old, sometimes
having been laid only a day or two be-
fore they made it to store shelves.
Beneath the shell, my chick-
sustaining fats and proteins explain
my alchemy in the kitchen. Present
in my fatty yolk is a potent emulsifier
called lecithin that chefs use to marry
foes—vinegar and oil, lemon and
butterfat—into smooth, silky sauces
and dressings. Cook me, meanwhile,
and invisible, curled-up proteins float-
ing within me will unfurl and then in-
terlock into a scaffolding that increases
in rigidity with heat. This reaction is
why an egg warmed low and slow will
be custardy while one frizzled over
high heat will verge on rubbery. A re-
lated effect happens when you get out
the whisk: When my whites are beaten,
the unfurled proteins interlock toform foamy peaks, first slumped, then
firmer and pert. Beat them too much,
and this scaffolding of proteins inter-
links so tightly that water weeps out as
if squeezed from a sponge, hence the
puddling around overbeaten whites.
Together these traits make me both
one of the simplest and most compli-
cated things to cook. It takes almost no
skill to hard-boil an egg or crack it into
a skillet and fry it with some butter. Yet
an exacting head chef looking to au-
dition a prospective cook can gather
practically everything he or she needs
to know from how that cook prepares
a classic French omelet. FYI, it should
be set but not browned on the out-
side, moist and slightly runny on the
inside—a perfectly oozy roll-up. To
achieve that takes finesse and long-
practiced wrists—and yet the test takes
just a couple of minutes, three eggs, a
pan, and a fork.
Easy yet difficult, fragile yet power-
ful. That’s multifarious me—the
ultimate food, contained in an un-
assuming carton in your fridge.Kate Lowenstein is the editor-in-chief
of Vice’s health website, Tonic; Daniel
Gritzer is the culinary director of the
cooking site Serious Eats.A Parent’s Growing Pains
How come it takes so little time for a child who is afraid of the dark
to become a teenager who wants to stay out all night?
planet proctor52 april 2019 | rd.com
Reader’s Digest I Am the Food on Your Plate