Have you ever approached your lovely lunch, dinner or snack of perfectly-hard-boiled egg with the question, what the heck kind of wine can go with this?
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. First, do you know how to perfectly prepare a hard-boiled egg?
This post is really an excuse to promulgate the consummate technique for such preparation. And, thanks to the recent retreat of the anti-fat food police and reinstatement of the egg’s good reputation, surely you are eating eggs again (if you ever stopped).
Julia Child, in The Way to Cook from 1989, introduced me to this recipe. It is not difficult but requires patience and close watching of the clock to time each step properly. Be sure to have that ice bath ready and waiting when you pull the eggs out of their “steeping” water.
Child didn’t take credit for the recipe, which she noted was developed decades ago by the Georgia Egg Commission. (Sadly—because who knows what other excellent tips and techniques may have issued forth from it in the future—said commission was disbanded last year by a vote of Georgia’s egg producers.)
If you can’t access Child’s cookbooks, you can find the instructions here on food.com. A tweak I recommend to the master recipe is to peel the eggs while slightly warm; I have found the shells don’t lift away so easily once the egg is cold.
And, for a slight variation along with shorter sitting time in the just-boiled water, see incredibleegg.org. Note: the original recipe calls for piercing to ¼” the large end of the egg with a needle or pin before placing it in the pot for cooking, while the revised version warns against this step, on the grounds that a non-sterile needle can introduce bacteria into the interior. I’d say, sterilize your needle first and pierce away!
As for that wine, white for sure. I conjure up a beautiful match between my beautiful egg(s)—which I prefer to eat freshly made and still somewhat warm—and a simple white Burgundy. I’m thinking Mâconnais—a Mâcon-Villages, Saint-Véran, Pouilly-Fuissé or Pouilly-Vinzelles.
Alternatively, a clean white from Spain, perhaps an Albariño or Godello; a Verdejo or Rioja Blanco.
In any case, a soft, non-grassy wine (I’d stay away from most Sauvignon Blancs) seems the ideal pairing for a late-summer eggy repast. Enjoy!
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Wine glass photo credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/dcbauer/3485439452/ Danielle Bauer, http://photopin.com, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/
