17. Quail Scotch Eggs

When some quails eggs were up for grabs, the first thing that sprung to mind was scotch eggs! I've often mused at the idea of making them, but this time i just went for it and used Heston's Recipe from the Times website.


Overall, it's quite a simple recipe with just a few fiddly bits (see below!). Aside from adding the seasoning into the sausage meat, all of the flavour comes from the ingredients rather than needing a professional palate (good for me!) so just make sure you use good quality stuff. My sausage meat was straight from the Food Hall...Broxtead Breakfast Sausage!


The fiddliest bit has to be peeling the boiled quails eggs- Heston's recipe leads to a soft-yolked finish, so at the peeling stage the eggs are quite soft and delicate. We had a few split whites which were salvagable with careful handling but unfortunately lost one egg completely! Following this, wrapping the eggs in the sausage meat (especially any that are slightly damagaed) is quite tricky. I found it a bit easier to flatten the meat into a rectangle then take a strip off the bottom (leaving a square) and lay the strip across the egg. Then, you're bringing the sides up to meat the top strip, rather than trying to squeeze the edges together around it. Plus i found it much faster to churn oil-ready eggs out!


The cooking was fairly undaunting, despite being nervous about dealing with the hot oil, and then it's just a case of holding back long enough to allow them to cool before cracking into one!

I was fairly chuffed with how they turned out for a first attempt; quite uniform looking, well cooked and generally pretty damn tasty!