T-minus four days: Experiments with quail eggs

I've wanted to work with quail eggs for a while. They're perfectly bite-sized and so elegant in their delicately spotted shells. Thanksgiving is always a great excuse to try some new things, and so this year I decided to include hard-boiled quail eggs on one of our menu items. (Don't ask which, I can't spoil the surprise.) But I've never dealt with quail eggs before, so I wanted to do a little experimenting with them before the big day, just to make sure that things would go as planned. As it turns out, this was a very, very good idea.

My victims --- er, experimental subjects:

I thought there were a dozen in the package but there were only ten. Will wonders never cease.

The main issue (so I thought) was trying to figure out how long it would take to hard-boil a quail egg. My usual procedure for hard-boiling eggs (thanks to Deborah Madison) is to start the eggs in cold water, bring it to a boil, let it boil for one minute, then kill the heat and steep the eggs in the hot water for six minutes with the lid on. Then I quickly plunge the eggs into ice water to stop the cooking. Then I can peel them or store them until I'm read to eat them. This method yields eggs with completely solid whites and yolks with just a little moist dab in the center. Obviously it would take a lot less time to cook a quail egg, but how much less? The experimentalist in me was ready to find out.

I started eight quail eggs in cold water, as usual, and prepped four bowls of ice water in which to shock the eggs at various stages:

I planned to pull out my eggs at each of four time points: just after the water came to a boil, after one minute of boiling, after a minute of boiling plus a minute of steeping, and after a minute of boiling plus two minutes of steeping. But I didn't want to rely on a single egg at each observation point. Statistical variations, you know. So I pulled two eggs at each of the four time points. (The remaining two eggs were lost to side projects, one an experiment in teeny sunny-side up cooking, the other an experiment in what would happen if I cracked one just before the water boiled. Answer: runny egg.) I let each batch of two eggs sit in cold water until I could peel them, and then opened them up to have a look:

The just-boiled eggs were still too soft in the center, but the rest of them were fully cooked. Of the remaining eggs, I thought that the ones that had been cooked for just a minute at a boil (the second batch) were the best, but I wanted to get a second opinion.

"Hey Michael, will you give this a try?"

"What is it?"

"Quail egg."

"No, they freak me out."

Significant pause. Um, dude, it's just an egg.

"Sweetie, I just want you to try it. I want to make sure it's cooked enough."

"Well, did you try it?"

"Yes. I think it's okay. Here, have a bite."

"No, they freak me out."

"Look, it won't kill you. Just tell me what you think."

"No, they freak me out."

I should pause at this stage of our conversation to note that this objection is from the guy who has been known to eat termites and kangaroo.

In an attempt to retain the scientific nature of the experiment, I ask: "Okay, what freaks you out?"

"I don't know, it just does. Look, I think those eggs have been sitting in the fridge for a while..."

"I tried one already, it's fine. Just tell me what you think."

"No, they freak ---"

"Just eat it, will you?!?"

This went on for five solid minutes.

Finally, I prevailed on him to try one of the eggs from the most promising batch, and I can assure you, gentle reader, that it did him no harm, although he did profess to not liking the taste very much. I personally didn't notice much of a difference between the taste of the quail egg and the taste of a regular hard-boiled egg, although I will admit that the quail egg had a somewhat more pronounced savory/eggy aftertaste.

So the answer to the original experimental question is as follows: To get well-cooked but not overdone quail eggs, start them in cold water, boil for one minute, then pull them out and shock them in ice water. QED.

The trouble is that even if they cook nicely, they're damn near impossible to peel neatly. Of the eight that I hard-boiled, only one of them came out of the shell even somewhat unscathed, and that one was in the last batch and was overcooked. So I ended up with lots of shell bits on my hand and lot of lumpy little eggs that looked like they had craters --- definitely not attractive, and definitely not attractive enough to serve to company. Not to mention the fact that the prettiest part about quail eggs is their shells, which of course need to be removed before eating. Otherwise they just look like little white blobs. The final nail in the coffin for this particular culinary project was the fact that most of the eggs cracked during the boil and had gotten waterlogged, leaving misshapen, pockmarked white lumpy blobs. I doubt that that's the sort of thing that whets anyone's appetite.

So, it's ix-nay on the ail-eggs-quay. In fact, it's ix-nay on any eggs in that particular dish, since we came up with a better serving solution. After the quail eggs experimentation, Michael and I tried coddling, then poaching a regular hen's egg (which didn't freak him out):

The poached egg turned out delicious, with a perfectly runny yolk and tender white. Nice though it was, we ultimately decide that it would be too much food to serve in one course, not to mention too damn much work to poach, drain, dry, store, re-heat, drain, dry and serve thirteen individual eggs. Well, maybe next year --- or maybe I'll learn some grand trick for dealing with hard-boiled quail eggs. Tips appreciated. 'Til then, it's on to the rest of the prep.