Tuesday was Maxine’s first “science day” in the Junior Chef’s kitchen. Before cooking can become an art, first it must be acknowledged as a science. The prettiest cake decoration is entirely pointless if the cake itself is unpleasant to eat. And so for lesson 2, I am introducing Maxine to the fundamental building blocks of all our foods, the macronutrients: carbohydrates, proteins, and fats. Then, we’ll take a deep dive into one of the most humble and magical, but above all the most essential ingredient to master as a budding chef.
The egg
Before the vegan readership breaks out in outrage, yes, of course, there are alternatives to cooking and baking with eggs. But, at chef’s school, the vegetarians must learn to sear a perfect steak, fish haters must learn to fillet and debone, and nut allergies won’t get you out of learning to make a perfect satay sauce – which also means finding strategies for checking seasoning and taste (you ask a colleague, in case you’re wondering). Not being able to eat something doesn’t justify not being able to serve a perfectly executed dish. Understanding the egg, its components, chemistry, how it acts and reacts, and what purpose it serves in different cooking techniques is not just a starting point for every chef, it’s also often the ultimate test put to a chef to assess their skill level.
Delia Smith, a British TV Chef – and possibly the world’s first influencer – dedicated the cover and first chapter of her How To Cook book series to the egg, including instructions on how to boil the perfect egg. While some reviewers poked fun at the low bar they felt this set for her readership, the supermarkets could barely keep up with the sudden demand for eggs in all their stores. Her egg episode increased nationwide egg sales by 10%, and a later recommendation to use a skewer for testing cakes saw sales soar by 35% – impact that modern day Gen Z influencers dream of.
By 2001, Delia’s impact on the food industry could no longer be ignored, and the Delia Effect was added to the Collins English Dictionary. Poke fun at that, you hoity-toity reviewers.
The Power of Eggs Brownies
As Maxine plopped down after a long school day, her usual routine of a salty snack and Coke Zero in hand, I took the opportunity to introduce her to the world of macronutrients. “Let’s talk about the three nutritional superheroes – carbohydrates, proteins, and fats. Have you heard of these?”
Taking the shrug and eyeroll as encouragement to get on with it, but do it quickly, I walked her through some basic examples: carbs like bread and pasta, proteins in meats and eggs, and fats in oils and butter, but also avocados and nuts. Maxine half-listened, her eyes occasionally darting to the kitchen where the promise of Brownies was laid out on the breakfast bar.
When, in a poor attempt to emulate Delia, I started to dive deep into the magical world of eggs – their components, their culinary superpowers – Maxine’s patience wore thin. “Egg whites provide structure, and the yolk helps emulsify sauces…” I was blabbering enthusiastically. ” Can we just START MAKING BROWNIES?” Maxine interrupted, her trademark sass shining through. Her message was clear: Brownies were calling, and Chef Maxine was ready to answer. The egg lecture would have to wait.
Oh, The Simple Joys
Despite my strong, and somewhat grumpy, assertion last week that Junior Chef’s College is about studying, not playing, my plan for this week was exactly the bowl-licking baking fest I had written about with such disdain. I forget some times how those simplest of things can bring such joy to children. I used to get hyperexcited over the silliest things: pressing the button in the lift, being the first to spot the family suitcase on the baggage carrousel, and of course, licking clean the cake mix bowl*. For Maxine, it’s cracking eggs. She gets great pleasure out of weighing ingredients, setting the oven temperature, controlling the heat on the induction hob, but she love, love, loves cracking eggs🥚🥚
At the end of every session together, I hand her the lesson plan for the following week, so she knows what is coming up and can, hopefully, get excited about coming back the following week, before she’s even finished eating the food we’ve just cooked. It also gives me a glimpse into how to play the upcoming lesson – she’s hella vocal about what she really thinks about my upcoming plans. Last week, this gave me the cunning insight that this science lesson would have to be taught around a challenge for Maxine to learn to crack an egg one-handed, like her father can. It is the ultimate achievement in egg cracking, as far as Maxine is concerned.
Forewarned is forearmed. Where the day called for 10 eggs between the brownies and egg recipes, I made sure we had 20 of the freshest eggs, and, in the fridge, another 4 eggs, but these about 1-month old. (For scientific purposes – not because my fridge management is out of control. Just saying, no need to be tutting at me while you read.)
Death by Chocolate Brownies
Knowing that hyperexcitement will likely ensue the moment Maxine cracks her first egg, I insist we complete the mise-en-place for the brownies first. Weighing & sifting the dry ingredients, measuring the white and brown sugar, melting the chocolate and butter. “Do you want to do this in the microwave or the old fashioned way?” I ask Maxine about this last task. Without missing a beat, she responds, “Old fashioned.”
“Au Bain Marie, it is,” I say, as she whips her head around and does that squinty eye thing she does when she’s caught out by an unexpected response. Knowing full well that this is about French, but not entirely sure if she’ll embrace or reject the idea of learning the French vocab that comes with being a chef, I continue on as if I haven’t noticed her squint. “We use a Bain Marie when we want to use only the gentlest of heat – for melting chocolate, but also for making a hollandaise sauce, for example,” I chatter on while I fill a sauce pan with an inch worth of water and place the metal bowl with chocolate and butter on top.
“Pourquoi ça s’appelle un Bain-Marie?” I hear a taunting whisper behind me. Challenge accepted, it seems, but not without a counter-challenge. First, I will have to prove that I can indeed speak French. “Je ne sais pas, Chef,” I answer truthfully, accepting of her counter, and inwardly praying to the God Maxine doesn’t believe in that she will accept my French as good enough soon, because I am embarrassingly out of practice.
“Oh, can you smell that!” I enthusiastically say in English, as I lean over the bowl of melting chocolate and waft the sweet, buttery smell over, in the hope this will distract Maxine from probing too much further into the veracity of my polyglotiness (what on earth do you call the quality of being a polyglot?) . The cheap trick works – thank you chocolate! – and we are soon back on the much safer ground of cracking eggs.
“Do you know how to tell if an egg is fresh?” I set up Maxine for her first set of egg-facts as she walks over to the her workstation to get cracking. “Hm.” Shrug. That eloquent (pre-)teen response is back. “Wanna see? I have been saving some old eggs for weeks, especially for today, so you can see the difference between fresh and old eggs.” I am betting (hoping, praying) that this is an irresistible carrot to Maxine’s insatiable hunger for factoids and general knowledge, but also to her slightly morbid curiosity for all things gore and rot.
True to form she responds, whipping around her head once again, but this time with wide-eyed curiosity rather than that distrusting squint. I crack one of the old eggs on a plate, and we watch the egg white spread out in a watery pool around the egg yolk that broke as soon as it hit the plate. “As the egg gets older, the chemical bonds in the egg get weaker, ” I explain. “That’s why the egg white is so watery, and the yolk couldn’t even hold itself together anymore. Now you crack one of your 4 eggs – I bought those fresh just yesterday, so we should be able to see the difference.”
She cracks, two-handed, and we stare at a perfectly domed, pert egg yolk in the center of a small circle of egg white that is thicker, much more bonded with the yolk. “Do you know what that bit is?” I challenge her further, as I point to a thicker, white and stringy blob floating in the egg white. Maxine takes her time – she possibly loves being “in the know” even more than cracking eggs. “Think about babies before they are born, ” I encourage her. “Umbilical cord!” Maxine shouts, jumping up in the excitement of having figured it out. “Well done, Chef,” I tell her, “in eggs that is called the chalaza. Now finish cracking the other three eggs and lets whip up this brownie mix and get it in the oven!”
She is lucky that she is ambidextrous, because just as with my longcuts before shortcuts theory on slicing potatoes, what follows next for Maxine is the tough job of whisking the eggs and sugar until pale, foamy, and doubled in volume. By hand, not by electric whisk. In my mind, visualizing our sessions beforehand as I do, this would be the perfect time to talk some more about the science of cooking. The different baking techniques, the theory behind brownies, the setting temperature of whites and yolks. In my mind, Maxine would be happy building arm muscles whisking for hours, while I talked her through McGee’s full Encyclopedia of Kitchen Science, History and Culture.
“Whisk for your life! Swap arms when you get tired!” I coach her like a drill sergeant, in between peppering her with interesting factoids on the molecular characteristics of food flavours. “Snap!”
Just as I am about to offer to take over for a while – Maxine is tiring out, swapping arms every third whisk until the whisking more closely resembles vigorous stirring – my cute pink silicon whisk snaps out of the handle, egg mix spraying around. Maxine looks up to me with big eyes – a look that is part defensive, blaming the whisk for the failure, and part concern, worry that I will be upset or the dish ruined.
“Excellent! That looks perfect now,” I say cheerfully, as I fish the whisk bits out of the sugary eggs. “Time to carefully fold in the melted chocolate.” I hand her a ladle and show her how to fold, in big sweeps, from the bottom of the mixture to the top, while rotating the bowl with the other hand. The brownies will not rise much, and will be even gooier than they are supposed to be, because of the under-whisked eggs, but what’s the point in telling Maxine? She probably loves gooey brownies anyway.
Maxine folds the chocolate, sifted flour and cocoa powder into the mix, while I preheat the oven and show her how to line a square baking tin, cutting the corners of the baking paper so it neatly fits. We made it, it’s in the oven – soon the house will fill with scent of chocolate happiness.
Let The Egg Cracking Fest Begin
With the brownies needing at least 35 minutes in the oven, we have a good clean-up so Maxine can get stuck into making a proper egg cracking mess. To take her through the theory of how proteins react to heat, and simultaneously review some of those magical egg properties that Delia speaks so eloquently about, I tell her we will be cooking Scrambled Eggs and Omelette on toast for dinner, while we wait for dessert to come out of the oven.
Maxine’s first attempt at one-handed egg cracking is neither a success nor a real failure. Rather than cracking the egg in half and splitting it open, she pokes her thumb through the bottom of the egg, and the white and yolk slide out. On her second attempt, the same thing happens, but this time she also snags the yolk. “It broke!” Maxine sulks. “Never you mind, they need to get scrambled anyway, so you’re just speeding up the process,” I reassure her. “Whisk the eggs with a fork until you can’t see any egg white at all anymore,” I say, bringing her focus back to the task, “You should end up with a homogenous yellow egg mix”.
After a couple of minutes of fervent whisking, Maxine turns around. “I can’t get all the white mixed in,” she says, sounding a little confused and deflated at being thwarted by something as simple as whisking eggs, while she pulls up the fork with a small blob of egg white dangling off it. “Aha!” I smile enthusiastically, “What you think that is?” as I point to the dangling blob. Maxine stares at it for no more than a moment before, once again, excitedly jumping out: “Umbilical cord!”
“We strain that out, before cooking the eggs, because you are right, that’s the bit that you can never whisk in, no matter how hard you try,” I explain. I can see a strange sense of satisfaction creeping over Maxine as she strains the eggs and finishes whisking up a perfectly homogenous yellow egg mix. All the annoying little factoids that I have been talking about while she has been so keen to just move on with the cooking part of Chef’s College are slowly slotting into place, finding their purpose, applicable in the here and now, and with immediate result.
I guide Maxine through the final steps, a dash of cream, good quality butter, low heat, and lots of stirring to create a creamy texture of small curdles. Just like with sweating onions, the turning point is sudden – one moment it’s looking silky, seconds later it’s yucky, rubbery, congealed roadside diner hell. “Lift it off the heat, quick, quick, now, now,” I tell her, as I see the eggs starting to overcook at an edge. “We want the eggs to stay a little baveux,” I tell her, ready for the French squint that inevitably follows. “Like baby’s drool,” I elaborate. “Oui, je comprends. Comme la bave d’un bébé”, she cockily replies, turning the scrambled eggs on a plate.
I watch her as she takes her first bite of scrambled eggs on toast and feel my own strange sense of satisfaction creeping over me. Wide-eyed, utterly surprised and amazed, Maxine looks at the piece of toast in her hand, stares up at me, and looks back to the eggy toast again while she slowly chews the bite she has taken. “I have never tasted eggs like this before,” she say quietly as she slowly lifts her head back up to me.
“I know, right,” I respond. I should probably also say: “Sorry Maxine, you will never enjoy scrambled eggs cooked by someone else again,” but I reckon she’ll figure out that heartbreaking part of learning how something is supposed to taste soon enough.
The Ultimate Test of a Chef’s Skill
Eggs really are seen as one of the ultimate tests of a chef’s skill. Many Michelin restaurants will ask new hires to prepare a classic French omelette as part of the interview process. They will expect a perfect execution: strained, homogenously whisked eggs, cooked slowly at a low heat, drawing the egg to the center of the pan to create volume, carefully folded into a cigar shape when the egg is still perfectly pale and baveux in the middle (so not quite the way it looks in the recipe below, I will replace the image when I do my next photo shoot!). Maxine and I had spoken about this at the start of our session and, still in awe of the best scrambled eggs ever, she was ready to take on the ultimate challenge.
While I clean up the kitchen a little before she starts, I ask her if she knows how to tell if an egg is fresh, without cracking it open, the final set of egg-facts for the day. Not waiting for her response, I instruct her to fill a sauce pan with water and bring over 1 fresh egg and 1 old one from the fridge. By now fully embracing the factoid learning method, Maxine follows the instruction without question and looks up to me in anticipation when she is done. “Pop both the eggs into the water, and watch the difference,” I tell her, as the old egg starts to float to the middle of the pan. “As the egg gets older, the air chamber at the bottom becomes bigger.” “And more air means more floaty!” Maxine finishes my sentence. “Can I put the other old eggs in too?” She ask, excitedly. Not bad going for our first science session, I think to myself, Maxine seems genuinely happy about everything she has learned today.
Now for the ultimate test. With a clean workspace and hob, I ask her, “Are you ready?” “Ready,” she responds, full of confidence. She starts well – whisk, strain, whisk some more; low heat, draw the egg to the middle. As the egg starts to set, I tell her to get ready to start folding. One third folded towards the middle, tilt the pan a little, fold it onto the final third. It’s looking perfect. Pale, a little bit of height showing the volume she has created by drawing the mixture to the center at the start, and still a little runny in the middle. I can hear my heart beating anxiously as I hold out the plate for her to turn the omelette onto it, and, “Splat.”
“I suck!” Maxine furiously shouts, putting the pan back on the hob.
“No, you don’t suck, Chef,” I tell her, “You just didn’t get the job. You’ll do better at your next job interview.”
Hangman and The Way Forward
The smell of brownies baking has filled the house. As I clean up the kitchen before the oven pings and we turn out the cake on a cooling rack, Maxine picks up my little whiteboard and leads us into a game of Hangman. Her four-letter word has me stumped. “You know this, I know for sure that you know this!” Maxine giggles as I am approaching certain death. “F,” I say randomly, as nearly out of available letters as I am out of lives. “Ah! Chef!” I breathe a sigh of relief as the word finally falls into place. Ok, culinary theme, I think, fun, I can recap the lesson this way.
Maxine guesses my “Brownies” with more difficulty than I expect, and as I am turning out the cake, she is giggling to herself as she plots her revenge and draws out the gallows and 28 dashes. “O,” I start. “No!” she giggles. “E,” I continue. “Ehm, yes, but, ehm, hang on, I’m not exactly sure where they are, let me think,” she responds. As she is spelling the word out silently, and I am staring at the dashes confused, unsure what on earth she is thinking of, she suddenly asks, “When can I cook one of my dishes for you again?”
“Oh, funny you should ask, I was just thinking about that this morning,” I bite, giving myself a little extra time to figure out this 28-character word in the process. “I thought we could do 3 formal lessons, and then 1 fun lessons and a quiz.” “Yay! A fun lesson!” Maxine exclaims enthusiastically, before turning around and suspiciously double-checking, “What exactly is a fun lesson?”
“Well, I thought maybe one fun lesson could be a Ready, Steady, Cook challenge, like the TV Show. Another could be you cooking your dish for me, and maybe a another fun lesson could be a field trip,” I suggest. “Field trip! What will that be?” she asks. “You’ve seen our French friend Chef Titi’s professional kitchen, but that was after service, after he cleaned up. I was thinking we could go for dinner somewhere nice, and I can arrange with the head chef that we can spend a little time in a corner, watching the brigade as they work through service.” Maxine’s face lights up with excitement as I finally click.
“Antidishesh…”
“Antideshis…”
“Antidisetish…”
“Antidisestablishmentarianism!” Maxine fluently and proudly shouts, grinning from ear to ear. Darn, how does this kid know that word? And how the heck can she say it so easily!
The Learnings
Maxine’s Learning Outcomes:
- Eggs have umbilical cords.
- Science can be fun.
- You can have an eggcellent time learning the basics and get eggcellent results as a reward.
My Learning Outcomes:
- Invest in a quality whisk.
- Your French is hella rusty – some French flicks on Netflix are needed.
- Your visualizations lack realism. Maxine is 10½ – that means not yet ready for molecular food science ala McGee, and not enough biceps for manual whisking. Try again when she’s 11.
- Antidisestablishmentarianism is the longest word in the English language and it is very hard to say.
*A note on raw eggs: I’m not a parent, but I suspect eating raw cake mix is no longer an acceptable thing to allow children to do. If, like me, you still find it irresistible, make sure you’re using the freshest eggs, handled appropriately, and you’re not immunosuppressed.