Nigella: At My Table review – fantasy cooking for people who don’t do the washing up
Turkish eggs for breakfast, spiralised chips and perfect puddings … Mere mortals can only admire the..
Turkish eggs for breakfast, spiralised chips and perfect puddings … Mere mortals can only admire the inimitable Nigella
I was staying in a hotel at the weekend. The best thing about staying in a hotel is having a different breakfast from usual. I went for poached eggs. Big mistake. They were all wrong – hard and vinegary, pale yellow globs of joylessness. You can tell a lot about a place – or a person – by their poached eggs.
The ones in Nigella: At My Table (BBC2) look dreamy, if a bit of a faff. “Life can be complicated; cooking doesn’t have to be,” Nigella purrs, but I’d say her Turkish eggs – poached eggs on garlicky yoghurt with a chilli butter sauce – look quite an effort, for brekky. Even the poaching process isn’t simple. First she cracks a chilled egg into a tea strainer, to get rid of the watery part of the white that makes that stringy fluff. The egg is then gently transferred into a ramekin (a cup will do if you don’t have one), where lemon juice is added. “It makes the white sort of go [Nigella sucks in through her pursed lips in an acidic lemon juice kind of way] and hold its shape better,” she says. Only then does the egg go into the pan.
