The Wind Attack

Last weekend I got a text message from my friend Mick that read the following:

Hey Andy, I just purchased a fresh emu egg. The insides are said to be creamy and delicious. Would you be interested in preparing something with it?

Well, you can imagine what my reply was. A couple days later, we made an omelette. Not just any omelette, the best damn omelette we’d ever eaten.

Step one, of course, was to find an egg chair and do a photo shoot with the emu egg in said egg chair. Why? Because emu eggs are beautiful and love being photographed. They are a dark blue-green color and have a somewhat unsettling texture. It’s the closest you’ll come to holding a fresh dinosaur egg, which is probably something to nerd out about.

So where did this fresh emu egg come from? Well, Mick and company had taken a day trip up to Solvang, California and visited OstrichLand USA. Lucky for them, now is the one time of year that their emus lay eggs. A female emu lays three eggs a year, so don’t expect to ever see them at your local supermarket. Because they’re so rare, this single emu egg had a price tag of $35.

Yikes! $35 to make one omelette? Mick didn’t buy the egg just for the insides though. The kind people at OstrichLand provide instructions on how to get the eggs insides out without destroying the shell. So don’t think of it of a $35 omelette, but a unique $35 trinket that comes with free omelette makings!

The shell is much thicker and more durable than that of a chicken egg. To extract the delicious contents, we placed the egg on a mug padded with paper towel then carefully drove the phillips head screw driver into the egg with a hammer. Once the initial hole was made, we angled the screw driver to make the hole larger.

Using a wooden skewer, we cleared away the membrane around the hole. Next we stirred the egg’s contents with the skewer to break up the yolk. Now it was ready to leave the shell. Tilted over a bowl, the short end of a flexible plastic straw was inserted into the hole. By blowing into the straw, all the white and yolk quickly came out of the shell. It was pretty exciting.

We were surprised that the inside of the shell was a pure white color, very much in contrast to its dark exterior. The inside was washed with soap and water and left to dry.

Now I was tasked with making the omelette. I happened to have some ripe organic tomatoes, fresh basil and some killer fresh mozzarella on hand. Caprese omelette sounded good but I wanted to make sure that I didn’t over season the emu egg, because I wanted to be able to taste the egg itself. I decided to cook the cheese with the egg, but leave the tomato and basil as a sort of relish. I seasoned the egg with some garlic, salt, a pinch of savory and then topped with red onion, urfa pepper flakes and porchini mushroom powder.

I used a rare Austrian tomato vinegar that I had bought at Cube last year for the relish. The tomatoes were on the sweet side, so a touch of the tomato vinegar brought up the acidity and gave an extra punch of tomato flavor. Tomato vinegar obviously isn’t a common ingredient, so if you don’t have it, just use balsamic instead.

Rather than trying to make a regular omelette that would be difficult to flip at such a large size, I decided to make it a frittata, baked in my 12″ cast iron pan. I like frittata better anyways.

Good choice Windattack! Mick’s girlfriend Arica quickly deemed this as “the best damn omelette.” I would not hesitate to agree. This egg was indeed “creamy and delicious.” So creamy in fact that Arica also said it was “like a dessert omelette.” We all started imaging what a cheesecake made with an emu egg would be like!

The mozzarella melted towards the edge of the pan and started to fry in the olive oil lining the pan. This gave for bites that tasted of fried mozzarella. Not like cheap mozzarella sticks, but like the magic of really good cheese mingling with really good olive oil. The tomato relish was simply the perfect topping, cutting the creaminess of the egg with something a little bit sweet and a little bit tart.