Real breakfasts have eggs. Any kind of eggs, go for it, take your shot with fried, scrambled, boiled or poached. You’ll probably end up with the same boring eggs you have cooked all your life. You know which, the runny whites, not quite fried, the burned wannabe omelets, the eggs that look like soup inside the shell, water with cooked bits all around. Eggs are hard to cook right. It’s not actually in them. They are complicated because they seem easy.
Common lines of thought go like “I have been eating eggs since forever”, of course, consumer experience can be valuable for knowing what you want. It’s not very useful in finding out how to get it. We are going to give you a couple of tips on how to make your breakfast a more interesting experience without taking a huge chunk of your morning routine time.
How to Spice Up Eggs
If the idea is spice, you can go a lot of ways. You can spice them before cooking, mid cooking or after. To spice up eggs you should also consider the spice itself. Spicing up can mean hot, Mexican style salsa, complex Indian cuisine flavor or peppery, European dishes. And, that doesn’t even begin to address the matter of how you want your eggs. Eggs are hard because they seem easy. They are great because they are versatile.
How About Scrambled?
If you want something homely, a breakfast that feels cozy and warm, you can’t go wrong with scrambled eggs. If, on top of that you want to make them interesting with spice, a good idea is to spice your dish before you cook it.
So if you want them scrambled, how to spice up eggs? While common recipes suggest salt and pepper for scrambled eggs, there are other dry spices you can consider.
Dry spices are great for mixing during the scramble part of the process, they don’t add up any moisture to the final dish like a sauce would do, so you won’t get mushy eggs. And, also, depending on the spice you use, you can get a well balanced taste at the end. Some great powders you can try are Cayenne pepper, curry (not too much though as it can be overwhelming) and cumin, which is very mildly spicy, but can round up the notes of an everyday breakfast.
If spongy eggs are not a big deal to you, and you don’t mind wet, the hot sauce you like best can be a good idea for your eggs. Hot sauce is good if added at any stage of the process, so there is hardly any room for mistakes with it. There are many hot sauce that goes well with your eggs. Here are 3 recommended hot sauce:
Do You Prefer Sunny Side Up Eggs?
Here is a proposal: divorce your eggs. That is not a suggestion for you to stop eating them, it is a tip to love them more. If you have time and you like hot spicy dishes, you may want to try the traditional Mexican breakfast Huevos divorciados, or split up eggs. The dish basically consists in two fried eggs, each bathed in a different salsa, one red, one green, separated by a wall of fried beans. The eggs may be served alone or laying on top of a bed of tortilla.
Red Half of Split up Eggs
The catch with this dish is making the salsas. Of course, you have the option of making just one hot sauce and keeping your eggs married, but where is the fun in that? The red half is a guajillo chilli sauce. It is basically fried onion, garlic, and tomatoes, blended with the chilli and then fried again. You can use any pepper for this one, just keep in mind that, if it is a dried up chilli, you add it to the blender, if it is a fresh one, fry it for a little while with the rest of the ingredients.
Green Sauce for Split up Eggs
For the green sauce, the process is basically the same. Fry up a couple of tomatillos, a small, juicy type of green tomato and physalis hybrid, with onion and garlic. Normally, a Mexican cook would use a couple of serrano peppers, small green and spicy chiles, but you can choose to leave them out so as to balance the hotness of the red sauce.
Naturally, both sauces should be salted to taste, and you can spice both, either one or neither. Your breakfast, your choice. The salsas go hot directly over your fried eggs.
Who Called For A Mixup?
Shakshouka is an Arabic origin dish. Its name kind of means “mixup”. Shakshouka is a dish of poached eggs in tomato sauce. It can be heavily spiced for a Middle Eastern feel or plainer and milder for an Italian, Mediterranean taste.
How to spice up eggs for Shakshouka? The process is quite simple actually. In a skillet, large, or a saucepan, fry some onion and peppers until they start browning at medium heat, that will be around five or six minutes. Then add tomatoes, a veggie or chicken broth, spices (go crazy here, well, not that crazy, but do be creative), salt and pepper. Simmer until the sauce grows thick. Carefully crack the eggs you want on top of the sauce and let them cook until whites are cooked, and yolk begins to solidify.
If you chose Arabic, you could serve with pita bread, if you went Italian, you could serve them over regular bread with some cheese and parsley. The great advantage of shakshouka is that it takes away one of the obstacles that come with poached eggs. Since the sauce is thick when you crack the eggs on top, there isn’t as much danger of having white bits floating all over like it is when boiling them in water.
You Now Know How to Spice Up Eggs
There you go, a precook, a post cook and a mid-cook recipe. All versatile and easy, all different and interesting. Go ahead and crack a few shells, boil an old and boring egg or try to put a spicy twist on the breakfast you have been eating your entire life.
