The Chasm

Hello everyone! I wanted to share something that’s a little different for this site, but very worth it in my book: a recipe. Through my forays on YouTube I stumbled across a channel called Cowboy Kent Rollins, a great source for “Cowboy Cooking”. I’d never been big into cooking, but I came to find out that he’s a big name in the scene and has cookbooks, cooking tools, a touring school and has appeared on many cooking shows and talk shows. You can visit his site at kentrollins.com and I encourage you to visit the site and his YouTube channel for amazing recipes and cooking tips. Now, on to my attempt at making his Scotch Eggs Recipe!

If you’ve never had scotch eggs before (I hadn’t) they are absolutely delicious and rather filling. Take an egg and about double its size: that’s how big of a crispy, sausage-y, smoky, oniony egg you end up with. The crisp, fried outer panko shell is seasoned with smoked paprika and dried mustard, giving a smoky crunch to the onion-sausage thinly wrapped around a medium-boiled egg.

First off, I want to say that watching the high-quality YouTube video before attempting myself combined with the expertly made written recipe was the root this success. Preparation is key!

I’m not going to go into too much detail about the recipe because I really want you to check it out for yourself here, but the only thing my wife and I had to actually go buy was smoked paprika as we had all of the other ingredients readily available at home. This isn’t an overly complex recipe but it does take a while to prepare as you make pretty much everything but the sausage from scratch.

You start out getting 6 eggs to a medium boil, then drop them in an ice bath and shell them. Afterwards you mix up a pound of breakfast sausage with some chopped green onions and divide it into 6 equal parts. Take one of your sausage parts and roll it out thinly between some wax paper or foil with a rolling pin or your hands: Kent says to keep it thin because you’ll be cooking it when frying, and if it’s too thick you’ll end up with pink spots in the middle. I tested both parchment paper and wax paper for the flattening and found wax paper doesn’t stick as much to the sausage as parchment paper, so use that if you can.

Now take one of your shelled eggs and wipe it down, then fold the flattened sausage over the entire egg. Kent mentions that dipping your fingers in water to prevent the sausage from sticking to you helps, and I can say there was a significant difference in wet fingers vs dry.

Once the eggs are all wrapped you coat them with flour, brush them with an egg wash, then roll them in a breading of panko, dried mustard, smoked paprika, and a little salt and pepper. Press them breadcrumbs into the sausage to make sure it sticks well during the frying!

The recipe calls for a 2 inch depth of fry oil (we used canola oil) in a Dutch oven at 350°. We didn’t have an oil thermometer around so we heated on a stovetop at medium until we could fry some crumbs of breading at a solid rate. Then you lower in your eggs and let them fry! The oil won’t cover them completely (yes, they’re THAT big) so you’ll need to roll them around a few times to let them cook all over. Frying time is 4-5 minutes for a deep, golden brown and we found closer to 5 minutes to be a good time for fully-cooked sausage and crispy breading (our oil may have been lower than 350°).

And there you have it! Six golden-brown spheres of goodness. Kent recommends a dipping sauce of horseradish and mustard to taste: we didn’t have any horseradish so my wife whipped up a little dip of her own that was very tasty: 1 TBSP mayonnaise (not miracle whip), 1 TBSP yellow mustard, and 2 TBSP Worcestershire.

Thanks for hanging out for my first show-and-tell of a cooking experience! These eggs were a lot of fun to make and I’m sure we’ll be cooking up some more very soon!