Three Eggs, Two Slices of Bread
Lotje Deelman was editor-in-chief of ELLE Eten, has been working for Allerhande for almost 15 years and worked behind the scenes on television programmes such as MasterChef, Worsten van Babel On Tour and De Nieuwe Lekkerbek. She ate pig’s trotter with Anthony Bourdain and flirted with Gordon Ramsay in his Aston Martin. Lotje is the (co-)author of more than ten cookbooks and, in her kitchen in the Drenthe countryside, is never too timid to set something on fire. At FavorFlav, Lotje shares what occupies her mind every week. This time: an annoyance that Lotje just can’t shake.
I always forget that I have it. You simply don’t think about it until it’s too late. Maybe you suppress it a little too, because you don’t want to have it. Or perhaps you unconsciously hope it will go away on its own as you get older. And wiser. Nope. I still have it.
Soufflé thinking
There are plenty of reasons to order an uitsmijter. The most common is that you simply really fancy one. The familiar flavour, the refined simplicity of just-set white and velvety yolk, with a consistency only egg yolks possess. A kind of restrained creaminess. An egg is one of the most ingenious ingredients in the kitchen (think meringue, mayonnaise, hollandaise, think flan, cake, soufflé), yet has a very modest appearance. Almost humble. It’s difficult not to love an egg.
Minefield
Sometimes an uitsmijter is also the only dish on a lunch menu you trust, when the rest is full of jokes and gimmicks (‘crazy goat sandwich’, or ‘I couldn’t give a sausage’) or promises you know for certain won’t be fulfilled, such as Grandma’s meatball. Yeah right.
Almost anyone can fry an uitsmijter. Just with bread, leave the garnish (minefield!) out, please, just an uitsmijter. No ham, no cheese, no roast beef. Without butter. Without margarine either, yes. Thank you. Lovely. Can’t wait.
So far so good. It only goes wrong when it’s standing in front of me. At first glance, nothing seems amiss. Plate, cutlery, three fried eggs. Still a limp and pale slice of tomato. Never mind. I pick the cutlery out of the cramped paper sleeve, which also contains the painfully thin napkin. I can live with that. Then I carefully lift the edge of one of the three eggs with my knife. There it is. I knew it. Three eggs, two slices of bread. Panic.
How, though?
How on earth am I going to divide that? Three eggs and two slices of bread. Keep breathing. Stay focused. But how? Three eggs and, damn it, only two slices of bread. I had wanted to catch the yolk, that delicious runny golden-yellow sexy yolk of the third egg, with that bread that was brilliantly absent. I had wanted to put my knife into it confidently. Full of trust, because I knew for certain that the bread underneath would lovingly catch the liquid yellow. That can’t happen now. So what?
Lonely yolk
Should I cut a third off each slice of bread, so that I have three two-thirds slices of bread? And then redistribute the eggs over them? With the risk that the yolk will break during the operation and the egg will sadly run out onto a spot and at a moment over which I have no control whatsoever? Or should I quickly eat that first breadless egg, without bread, not tasty but effective, then pretend nothing happened and continue with one egg per slice? I could, but the thought of lonely yolk in my mouth without the comforting backup of bread is not a pleasant one. I hesitate. I simply don’t know. It catches me off guard: three eggs, two slices of bread. Every single time.
