The French Chef with Julia Child

JULIA

If you're in an egg-cooking rut, get out of it with me. We're doing elegance with eggs, next time on The French Chef.

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The French Chef is made possible by a grant from Safeway Stores.

JULIA

Boiled eggs, poached eggs, fried eggs, scrambled eggs. These are breakfast eggs. We are doing eggs today, but we're not doing any of these on The French Chef. Welcome to The French Chef. I'm Julia Child. You know, the egg can be your best friend if you just give it the right break. And I'm not talking just about breakfast eggs, but eggs for brunch, eggs for lunch, eggs for appetizers, for company, and eggs for elegance. Now, take, for instance, l'oeuf en cocotte, or eggs baked in little dishes like this. These are called little ramekins. You can use a cute little French thing like this in fireproof porcelain with a tail on it. Or here's a little miniature souffl dish. And here is just an ordinary little ovenproof glass dish. And this is a little miniature charlotte mold. But you can use any kind of a little baking dish that you like. And these are very quickly done. As you'll see, you set them in a pan of simmering water. And then, depending on the size of your dish, you break one or two eggs in. And I've put-- You have about a half tablespoon of butter in the bottom of each dish. And then break the egg in. Whenever you're doing baked eggs, you have to cook them in a pan of water in the oven. Otherwise, if you just put them in naked into the oven, that intense oven heat would harden them up and make them not cook very evenly. Then you can either cook them perfectly plain... You could use these for breakfast perfectly well, which would be nice, or you can put all kinds of nice things in with them. One of the simplest things would be to put in a little bit of fresh cream. So put in about a tablespoon or two of heavy cream and then a little bit of pepper. You do want to be careful not to salt the egg, the yolk itself, because if you do, that sometimes speckles it. So I'm just putting a little pepper around the outside of the egg. And then put in some chopped herbs, such as-- if you don't have anything but parsley, put that in. But it's awfully nice if you have parsley and chives or parsley and chopped scallions. And then as another idea, you could put in cream and some cheese. So, there we've got another tablespoon of cream and then some Swiss cheese right on top of it. And another idea is you could just put in some very nice tomato sauce. And if your sauce is nicely flavored, you don't need any salt or pepper around with the egg. Then I'm gonna leave one perfectly plain. I might put a little bit of parsley on top of that. Then you want to let these stay on top of the stove in their simmering water until when you look down in you see that the egg has just begun to film and set on the bottom of the mold. You probably can't see in that one, because it's white. I should've left this glass one, and you could have seen the egg gradually beginning to set there. And then another thing you can do is you can cook them in muffin tins. This is just a plain, ordinary muffin tin which I've buttered heavily. And these are very nice if you want to use what they call molded eggs, which would turn out just like this, and you use them instead of poached eggs. Here's a poached egg. If you're not used to poaching, it's something of a trick to do. But if you want to mold them, it's very easy to do. You do it exactly the way you would these eggs en cocotte. Again, set it in a pan of water and then butter it very, very heavily, 'cause you want to be able to unmold it. Particularly butter it heavily on the bottom and then break your egg in. And you want that, again, to set on the bottom before it goes into the oven. And if you're doing any other molded eggs or these eggs en cocotte, or baked in ramekins, ahead of time, you can get this first part of it done, of the egg set into its pan and then set it aside and then put it in the oven. And these would go into a 375-degree oven and will cook for about six or seven minutes. And then when the-- Here are the eggs in ramekin when they're done in six or seven minutes. You want to be sure that you don't overdo them. Because if you overdo them, they're hard. So that you look at them, say, in six minutes, and then they should shake. The eggs should shake a little tiny bit in its cocotte. And it will continue cooking just a little bit when it's done. And so that you don't want to overdo it at this point. And then, again, if you want to do these ahead of time, you can take them out of the oven and leave them in their pan of hot water. And they will stay warm for a little while. And then for our molded eggs, you want the same thing with the molded eggs. When you take them out, let them shimmer. So, you notice that's just shivering a little bit in there. It shows that it hasn't been overdone. And then after you've taken that out, take it out of its pan of water and then let it settle for about five minutes so that you can unmold it. And to unmold it, you just take a table knife and go all the way around the edge and then push it. And you'll see that it'll-- You see that's loosening, so it's ready to unmold. This is very much like unmolding a custard. You have to let it settle a little bit. See, so that's all ready to unmold. And this you can do ahead of time. And then, it sounds strange, but after you have done them, you can set all of these in a bowl of water and just set it uncovered in the refrigerator. And when you're ready to use it, then you can put them in a bowl of hot salted water, just as you would a poached egg. And then to serve them, you can use these molded eggs in any way that you would use poached eggs. And you can make perfectly elegant little first course entres with them. Now, for instance, if you-- This would be-- this is a little piece of white bread cut in a circle and sauted in butter. And then here is some spinach. And I also have some cheese sauce. This is just a nice cream sauce with a little Swiss cheese in it. And then this is cooked chopped spinach. And then put a little bit of the sauce into the spinach. And be sure that this is beautifully flavored. And then put your spinach on top of the toast. And if this were just a first course, you would just use one of these for each serving. If it were a main course, you would use probably two. And then you have your hot egg, and you put that right on top. And then cover that with your sauce. And you could use a hollandaise sauce or barnaise sauce or whatever lovely sauce you felt would go nicely with it. And then you'd want to decorate the top. I have here a little fluted cooked mushroom. And that's always very elegant to go with them. And then, if you wanted, you could also have a little tiny bit of parsley. This is the same-- very much the same idea as the eggs Benedict. Of course, the eggs Benedict, I think, one has seen so much, it gets a little bit tiresome. That's the egg on a muffin with a piece of ham and then some hollandaise sauce. But you can do so many other things with them besides that same old Benedict-y one. And this one with the spinach would be called oeufs pochs Viroflay. "Viroflay" sounds nice. It's where spinach comes from in France. Or you could call it l'oeuf florentine. Anything that's called "Florentine" always has spinach with it. And you can use, of course, on top of your little piece of toast, is a wonderful way to use nice little leftovers, such as if you have, say, a little leftover poached or broiled fish, you could mix that with a nice sauce, spread that on your toast, put your egg on it, and then put more sauce on top of it. That's one of the nice things about eggs, that there's so many leftovers that you can use with elegance, and you can use all of your knowledge of sauces... and turn out something as a first course or a main course which is really perfectly lovely. And now we're gonna do a second group of eggs, which are called shirred eggs. And these are, of course, both for breakfast or for lunch or brunch, or whatever you'd like to use them, or as a first course. And these are eggs that are put in little flat pans like this, and then are started, just so that they begin on the oven, and are then-- I mean, on the top of the stove, and are then put under the broiler. And again, you have to do them this way, because if you put the egg like this right in the oven and baked it again, you'd get a tough egg. And what you want is this lovely tender quality. So you set your little pan over heat. And if you don't have one of-- This happens to be an enameled iron pan, which is very nice 'cause you can set it either on the stove or in the oven. Or if you don't have that, you can use a fireproof glass one. Here are some other little porcelain ones. But these, it would be dangerous to set on top of the stove. You could set them on one of these simmer plaques. This one I just got at our local hardware store, and it's very useful. 'Cause you would set your little dishes on this or in a dish of water to get them started on the bottom. And so now, with the shirred egg, I'll just do a plain one, 'cause I want you to see exactly how it works when it gets into the oven. You put in about a tablespoon of butter and then you could break either one or two eggs in. And these eggs can be so delicious when they're properly made as you'll see how quick it is. But if they're done in the oven, they get rather like leather, and they're usually overdone. Now, again, you want to make sure that it just has taken on the bottom. And you can tell by looking at it, because the bottom will just film. And then as soon as the bottom has filmed with coagulated egg, then it's ready to go into the oven. There. So that has, so this is gonna go on a dish here, and I have another egg, which has some cream and, uh... cream and cheese on it. Now these, again, you can do ahead of time, get the bottom all filmed. And with this one here, which just has two teaspoons of cream and some cheese on it. Then, when you're ready to serve-- and this is only gonna take about half a minute-- put it under an absolutely red-hot broiler, and get it just as close under the broiler as possible. And then pull out your dish every minute or two and see-- I mean, about every five or six seconds, and see how it's doing. And have a little dish with some butter ready, for the naked egg is gonna need a little bit of basting. Now you can see that is already starting to cook there. So baste it with a little tiny bit of butter on the top. And I think this is-- I just love these eggs. I think they're so much nicer than a fried egg, 'cause they're very soft and tender and lovely. And with these, you can do all kinds of variations with these, such as the cheese that we mentioned. Now, so you keep bringing it out. Now, you have enough butter on the top, so that you just baste this. And as you baste it, the yolk becomes filmed over with a lovely sort of white veil. And that's why these are often called l'oeuf au miroir, or mirror eggs. Now, this is-- Oh, I think this is now done. Because, again, we have this... we have this dish which is rather heavy, and so the egg will continue cooking a little bit in the dish. Now, look, you see, that shimmies in the dish, which is just what it should do. And then with these, after you have the egg shirred, then you can decorate it with whatever you like. Say that you have some chopped ham, you'd put that around one edge. And then you could put a little bit of... chopped herbs on top. There are all kinds of things that you can do with these shirred eggs, then you'd have your hot filling at the end and just put them around. And you see this one here has the browned cheese and the cream on it. And that is a lovely combination. And now... We're gonna do some omelets. And this-- I'm gonna use two different kinds of pans-- This is the French pan, and it has a seven-inch bottom diameter, and high, sloping sides and a long handle. And it's a very nice convenient pan, and it only costs about $2.50. And when you buy it, you have to-- because it's just iron-- you have to scrub it out with scouring powder, heat it, oil it, let it sit overnight, wipe it dry with paper towels, and then just before you're gonna make an omelet with it, you put some table salt in and set it again over heat, and rub it out with a paper napkin and it's ready to go. And omelets are one of the nicest and sort of exciting main course or first course dishes. And you can make them in about 20 seconds or less. So... The best omelets are made with two to three eggs, so we're gonna make this with two eggs. If you try to make omelets larger, they're just not as tender. And a French omelet this is a French flat omelet. The kind, if you go over to France and ask for an omelet, you will get. And it has a very delicate, lovely interior of coagulated eggs, which are surrounded by a cloak of-- No. Inside is custard and the outside is coagulated eggs. You have your two eggs, and a little bit of salt and a little bit of pepper, and you beat it up just enough to mix it. And then set it over a high burner, and put in a tablespoon of butter. And then you want to be sure to wait until your butter is hot. You have to, for an omelet, 'cause it goes very, very quickly, you have to be sure that your butter and your pan are very hot, indeed. And you can always tell-- we've done this a great many times, but in case somebody hasn't seen it-- you can always tell how hot the pan is by looking at your butter foam. You see, now your foam is foaming up, and as soon as it begins to subside, it means that the butter is hot enough to cook in, because while it's still foaming, the butter is only about 212. Because there's still liquid that is evaporating, but then as soon as the liquid has evaporated, then the butter begins to brown. And you want to get it just before it begins to brown. Then in go your eggs... then let it settle for a minute. Grab the pan with your left hand, and take your fork, and with the bottom of your fork, just stir the omelet around like that. Then as soon as it's coagulated, get the egg down in the bottom of the pan and shake. Shake your pan a little bit and make sure that this is loosened on the bottom. And then have your warm plate, and change hands like this. And with the lip of your pan on the plate, just turn the pan over and there's your omelet. You see, that's very, very quickly done. And now you don't have to use a... an omelet, a fancy omelet pan. I didn't know this until we went over to England and I saw a woman called Fanny Cradock do an egg show on the TV over there. And she invited people just to come in with any old pan. And this is just an old iron pan I've had kicking around the house. You heat it up very hot on the burner, and then you take a piece of fresh pork fat, and you rub the pan with it. And you've got to be sure that your pan is very, very, very hot. I don't know why this works, but it does. I had always thought you had to have a special pan for omelets, 'cause you can't cook omelets in a pan that sticks. As you can see, it's got to slide. Now, see, that's beginning to smoke, so rub it with your paper towel, and then take it off the heat. And then go and make your omelet with it. 'Cause very often, if you're an omelet expert and you go and visit people, they want you to make an omelet, and then there isn't any omelet pan. So if you use this trick, you can make an omelet no matter where you are. There are two eggs again. Then I'm gonna heat up this pan and put in the butter. These iron pans get hot awfully quickly, particularly, and you want to be sure that you don't let your butter burn, or you get an awful taste. You see those eggs are just beaten up about... oh, 20 or 30 strokes. And then in they go. The problem with these-- see, this short handle's sort of a nuisance, 'cause you have to keep holding on to it. As you'll notice with this omelet, there's no liquid added at all to it, 'cause you want to be sure it doesn't stick. See, and there's, that was... tipping the pan to get the omelet down at the end. (grunts) (laughs): You can see why a long handle is easier, and then, again, the unmolding just... like that. Then, if your omelet hasn't shaped up as nicely as you'd like, you can just push it together with a fork. Now, isn't that quick? That's 20 seconds, and that's all it takes to do a very nice omelet. And remember that the two-to-three-egg omelet is much the best. And now we're gonna do a filled omelet, an omelette au champignon. And whenever you're gonna do a filled omelet, be sure that you have whatever filling you... you're going to use all ready. And these are sauted mushrooms. So I'm just gonna keep them warm on a burner. And then, with your omelet pan, just have a lot of paper towels ready. You never need to wash a pan for omelets; you just wipe it out with paper towels. You always... and you don't want to wash it, because it's better to leave a little bit of oil in the pan. So, we'll do the same system. We're gonna break-- I think I'll make a three-egg omelet this time. That's two eggs, and three. And... salt, about... I'm using about... well, I should say about a quarter of a teaspoon, and then just a few good whaps of pepper. And then beat them up. Then I'll heat my pan. And, again, a tablespoon of butter. And be sure when you're making the omelet that you tilt the pan in all directions, because you want to have not only the bottom but the sides filled-- I mean, filmed with butter, so that you can be sure to unmold it. Then you have your filling warm and beautifully seasoned. It's terrible to make things-- Say if your filling hadn't been properly seasoned, it wouldn't taste very good. Now, again, we're waiting till our butter foam is just right. That's almost beginning to brown. So, in go the eggs. Then you'll remember, let them settle for just a moment there. And I'm stirring with the back of the fork. And when they've almost coagulated, set it to the side and then put in a spoonful of your filling right, sort of, down on that far third. And then let it go again. You can shake your pan up. You'll find when you start making omelets, you will make your own system. But the important thing is, in the good French omelet, you do not want it overcooked. The inside is supposed to remain just a little bit creamy. And there's a serving plate. And, again, the unmolding. You see, with the unmolding, you just turn the plate over on it. Now you can serve the omelet just like that. Or if you want to be fancier, you can cover it with some more sauted mushrooms. Or you could fill it with creamed spinach and then put the mushrooms on top. Then we're gonna-- I think we shall do a gratined omelet. So, I have this cheese sauce here. So, I'll just put the cheese sauce on. This is another omelet I saw that Fanny Cradock on the BBC do, and I thought it was such a good idea... that you would enjoy it. Then you have your sauce on and then sprinkle it with a little bit of grated cheese. And if you're using French recipes, unless it's otherwise specified, you always use Swiss cheese. It's not a ter-- it doesn't have a very strong taste, but it has just-- it has just the right French taste. And here's a little melted butter. So we put a little melted butter on. And then that is all ready to brown. You could-- I think you could get this omelet done somewhat ahead of time and then put your mushrooms on and your cream sauce and brown it when you're-- just before you were ready to serve. Because, you see, we have a fairly heavy coating of mushrooms, but the important thing here with this omelet is that you brown it under a red-hot broiler and that you don't overdo it. So, I've got it in a red-hot broiler there, and I'll have to sort of keep looking at it. And this will take about a minute. And if you have a... if you have the burner that comes a little farther down or you could set it on a plate, it might brown a little quicker. Now, other fillings that you could use-- when we were at Roquefort in France this last summer, where they make the Roquefort cheese, they had a lovely omelet which was filled with Roquefort cheese and then the cheese was mixed with a little bit of cream sauce and folded into the omelet. And then on top of the omelet, they had a cream sauce. And then they sprinkle a little butter and then they browned it under the broiler. It was very good. A nice, rich one. And, now, other fillings would be creamed lobster or shrimp or asparagus or chicken livers. Spinach, of course, is extremely good. And if you don't want to fill the omelet by folding it in, you can very easily slit the top of the cooked omelet just a little bit and then just sort of spoon the filling on top of the omelet. And a little bit of it goes into the split. But, remember, when you're making omelets, don't put in any liquid or any liquid-making ingredients, such as-- Some people think, "Oh, wouldn't it be nice to put some chopped tomatoes in?" Well, you put the chopped tomatoes in and then try and make the omelet. It all turns out runny and the eggs are coagulated and it's just a mess. So if you want something like cooked tomatoes-- I'm gonna look again at my omelet, that's coming along nicely-- you would put it in either as a filling or as a topping. But don't ever beat anything into the eggs, unless it's something that's dry. Fines herbes, for instance, which would be chopped parsley and chives, would be very nice in it. And that's dry, so you can beat it right in with the eggs. Now, there is our omelet gratined with mushrooms. And that makes a perfect main course luncheon or supper dish. All you need to serve with that would be a green salad and some French bread and a nice white wine. And now, let's go back and look at what we have. We have our little eggs en cocotte. We have the ones with the tomato sauce and the cheese and the cream. And then we have our molded eggs, which were done in the same way. As you remember, start those out in a pan of water in a 375-degree oven. 'Cause they have to be in the pan of water or they're not gonna be lovely and tender. Then we have here our shirred eggs. And these, as you remember, you start on the stove until it's just begun to coagulate. And then you put it under the broiler. And with these, you can put on cheese or cream and broil them with the cheese or cream on, or you can fix them afterwards. So the egg can be one of your very best friends. You've seen just a few of the hundreds of dishes you can do with eggs. So all you need is this and a little bit of imagination. That's all for today on The French Chef. This is Julia Child. Bon apptit. Captioned by Media Access Group at WGBH access.wgbh.org

ANNOUNCER

Julia Child is coauthor of the book Mastering the Art of French Cooking. The French Chef is made possible by a grant from Safeway Stores.