Hi! Just wanted to say I tried your katsudon recipe and it was amazing!! Sadly we were so excited to try it we forgot to take pictures. It was my first time deep frying so it took a while to get the hang of it. Sadly the only part that didn't work out was the onsen egg... :( the onsen egg wasn't cooked through so I awkwardly microwaved it. (Note to anyone who is trying this recipe, you should crack the onsen egg into a bowl before pouring on the katsudon in case it was near raw like mine)
Me: You have a lot to do, definitely do all of it today and don’t procrastinate.Me to me: Answer this ask with way too much information about eggs and hand-draw graphics even though you can’t draw.
Oh, thank you so much! I’m glad it mostly worked for you.
Confession:I have actually never tried the recipe for onsen eggs because of my aforementioned ridiculous kitchen gadgetry, and so that part was kind of a…guess? On my part? The author of that blog has never lead me astray before. :(
THAT BEING SAID possibly you might have noticed that I have Thoughts About Eggs and Cooking, and I’m very sorry but I’m going to add them here, for no other reason than because I’m going to link this ask to the original recipe. So let me just preface it by saying that I’m not trying to say anything about where YOU land on the egg continuum, but I have Egg Thoughts and they ended up slipping out because I talk very excitedly about things that excite me. I’m very sorry. It’s a personal failing and I’ll try to do better.
Egg cookery is a continuum–think of it like meat, with temperatures ranging going from raw to well-done. I tried to write about this using words and then decided to draw a picture instead even though I cannot Art.
“Cooked through” means different things to different people. To a first approximation, various egg proteins denature (which kinda means cook for purposes of these discussions) at different temperatures. A hard-cooked egg has more kinds of protein denatured than a soft boiled egg which has more protein denatured an egg 65 that cooked for 45 minutes. Denaturing bacterial proteins usually kills them, which is why cooking generally makes food safer.
(Food snob sidenote: For sheer food snobbery, the less you can do to the egg, the better it will taste. The yellow range on the above graphic is my preferred egg-temperature range. One of the things I read about katsudon actually suggested that some people do not cook the egg at all, because the Japanese, like many, many other cultures, do not see raw egg as inherently gross. Americans don’t either, as long as that raw egg is in cookie dough.)
(Sidenote, because what is an overly excited answer to an ask without an irrelevant sidenote: I’m not trying to assume you’re from the US, but I’m throwing this out for other readers who are. There’s a reason for these cultural egg distinctions, and in part it’s a food safety issue. Here in the US, we are really, really weird about eggs–we raise our chickens in tiny boxes, which means the eggs we get are more likely to be contaminated by bacteria. Our regulations require that we power wash eggs, which strips the eggs of a protective coating, meaning that they are even more likely to be contaminated. This is why, in the US, eggs are sold refrigerated when they are by biological necessity shelf-stable for weeks. (Second parenthetical pause–for many non-Americans, that will look like a weird statement. Yes, if you’re in America and you want to buy eggs, you need to get them from the refrigerated section of the store, usually near dairy. If you’re not in the US and you’re looking for eggs, they’re usually not refrigerated. Don’t be me, wandering aimlessly through a store looking piteously for eggs near milk.) For all these reasons, eggs are a much more dangerous proposition in the US than elsewhere. These strong safety norms regarding eggs tend to be passed down culturally as “ew, that’s gross” but neither the safety issues nor the attitudes that result from them are universal.)
For bacterial purposes, eggs from “gloop” on up are “cooked.” But living in a country where you’re more likely to get sick from uncooked eggs means that we pass on pretty strong norms of egg cookery. I know people who won’t eat scrambled eggs that are even slightly soft, so making scrambled eggs in a bain marie is completely out for them (even though they are delicious that way and 100% safe).
An ideal onsen egg is cooked in that the white of the egg is translucent white instead of clear, but it will by no means be firm, and the white will not be totally opaque. It will be gloopy as hell. Expect a consistency similar to vanilla pudding. To some people. this will come across as “not cooked.”
It is, for safety purposes, cooked (unless you are pregnant or have lowered immunity for some other reason, in which case definitely trust a doctor or something over me).
There are people who hate gloop in eggs, and if you are one of those people, this recipe is definitely not for you.
