Move over cronuts (391,000 posts), avocado toast (101,900) and gravity cakes (675): #cloudeggs (5,000 and another 1,000-plus when you drop the “s”) are having a moment on Instagram.
What are cloud eggs? They’re a picture-perfect whipped egg white nest that is lightly browned in the oven then finished with a sunny egg yolk in the middle.
Somebody has already trademarked CloudEggs, with an official page “coming soon.” But according to NPR’s The Salt, cloud eggs are not really new. Since ancient times, cooks have been fascinated by how the proteins in eggs coagulate when whipped.
So I gave it a try.
I started out whipping my eggs whites with my heavy-duty KitchenAid stand mixer, but, as I have long suspected, my whisk attachment is not in proper alignment with the bottom of the bowl. When the whites were not getting fluffy, after waking everyone still sleeping in my house, I switched to a hand whisk for a few minutes.
A @mumsnet video showed the cook giving the finger when whisking the egg whites by hand with a fork. She had better success with a whisk to form a stiff foam.
“Fab or Fad?” asks a slide at the end of the video. Most of @mumsnet followers concluded it was so much faff — a British slang term for a waste of time. Which probably explains the hashtags #cloudeggsarentthatgreat and #cloudeggstaketoolong.
I had what could be called a #cloudeggsuccess by cooking the egg at 450 degrees, but there was no flavor and the texture was rubbery. Think meringue, without the sugar.
Conclusion: Pretty, but why bother?
About the Author
