Scotch Egg, Only Mexican!

As soon as I heard of sous vide, I liked the aspect of cooking a steak, vegetables, crème brulee, and eggs to perfection. I took the idea with eggs and wondered if there was a way to make a scotch egg perfectly every time? I reached out to numerous websites on modern styles of cooking and didn't get any reliable feedback (I assume they thought I meant with the egg fully assembled, meat and coating).

Then recently, I came across a dude that Sous Vides Everything (if you are here, I am sure you know them). Not wanting to simply replicate their recipe, nor a traditional scotch egg, I will take my Latinx heritage and make this my version.

You will need pots and pans and regular kitchen utensils that I won't specifically list. However, I will for the specialty stuff:

spice grinder

immersion circulator

mixing bowls

Homemade chorizo:

1 pound ground pork

1/2 tsp cumin

1/4 tsp coriander

1/2 tsp Mexican oregano

2 tsp salt (or 1 tsp salt/1 tsp msg - msg really brings home the meaty flavor)

pinch of freshly ground black pepper

1/8 tsp ground cinnamon

pinch of ground cayenne pepper (although you may want to up the spice and add a chopped pepper of your choice)

4 cloves garlic, chopped

1/4 of a white onion, chopped

2 guallijo chiles

2 ancho chiles

2 Tbsp apple cider vinegar

OPTIONAL for more spice, up the ground cayenne or chop your favorite pepper, like serrano or habanero

You could skip this step and simply buy some chorizo from the store, but if you want to go homemade and you have the ingredients ready from the previous step, then let’s begin.

I lightly toasted my cumin, coriander seed, and chiles to brighten up their flavor before adding them. You don’t necessarily want to char the chiles, however. Everything should let out a nice aroma and have some spots on them from the cooking process. At this point, add the spices to your spice grinder along with your Mexican oregano. Place your chilies in a container or bowl and soak them in some hot water for about 15 to 20 minutes, just so they get pliable for blending.

Pro tip: you can find fresh chilies at a Mexican market and you want them to be pliable already, kind of like a raisin! What you don’t want is to buy them where they crack/chip away in your hand or have them stored away in your pantry where they do the same.

While you are waiting for your chilies to soak, grind up your spices and add them to the black pepper, salt, cayenne pepper, cinnamon, and optional msg/fresh peppers.

When your chiles have soaked long enough, drain the water and add everything, including your apple cider vinegar, to a blender and purée. Don't forget about the onion and garlic. If you don’t want the skins in your mix you can strain at this point and add this to your pork. Either way I think it turns out well. Mix this chile mixture with your pork and let it sit for at least 30 minutes to a couple of hours for the flavors to meld.

Pro tip: be careful not to overmix your meat and chile mixture. The salt content isn't too pronounced but overmixing will form a chain with your myoglobin which would be great for sausage but would be harder to work with later. Yes, I know chorizo is sausage but we aren't stuffing this in a casing or anything. You want to shoot for something in between, worked but not gooey either.

Take a little morsel of your meat and cook to check for seasoning. You can adjust seasoning now so that you know the finished egg will taste yummy later.

When cooking your eggs sous vide, you don’t need a food saver/vacuum seal device. You don’t even need plastic bags and worry about displacing all the air out! You can simply heat up your water and carefully drop them in (I use rubber tongs).

We want to do a soft boiled egg. The way that Guga from Sous Vide Everything figured this out was as follows:

195F for 8 minutes

Pro tip: go 18 minutes if you want a hard boiled egg, in general, pic 5. Notice that in the picture there is no weird green layer like you may see with traditional stovetop cooking methods!

I used my Joule (immersion circulator for sous vide) and allowed my water to heat up but DON’T HEAT THE WATER WITH YOUR EGGS IN IT!!!

When the water is at temperature, carefully add them, wait for the timer to stop and immediately add them to an ice water bath to stop the cooking process. Let them rest for five minutes.

After you wait five minutes in the ice bath (really for any type of boiled egg), crack the bottoms just a little bit and place them back in the ice bath for two additional minutes. This allows some water to flow in the crack, releasing the membrane from the egg white. This vastly helps removing the shells.

Pic 3 shows one an egg I peeled immediately after removing from the ice bath (the first 5 minutes). You can see how the membrane grabs some of the cooked whites when peeling. For a scotch-type egg prep, this really doesn’t matter but for general egginess, it helps!

Now that we have everything ready, prep the egg for frying. I rolled my meat between two pieces of cling film with an empty wine bottle. Cooking with wine, you know what I’m sayin’, but you could use a rolling pin, too. You want your meat about 1/4-inch thick. You want it so thin to ensure that your meat cooks all the way through when frying. Your egg is already cooked and you could eat them right now if you were so inclined. Your meat is raw and if left too thick and not uniform, it may not cook all the way through when frying. This makes for bad eats…

Prep a dredging line of flour, followed by a whipped egg, and finally some breadcrumbs. Season every coating to your liking. I added salt to all, some Aleppo pepper to my flour, and some crushed up corn nuts to my Panko bread crumbs.

Note: my mindset for the corn nuts was to add more corn flavor which is a staple in Mexican style cuisine. We have used these for stuffing (thank you Rick Martinez) for thanksgiving and it’s definitely my favorite except for my Aunt’s. However, that being said, after frying the eggs, the flavor is a bit muted and I think the sugars caused them to get darker than I would have liked. Flavor-wise, there’s no acrid/burnt taste but there’s no enhanced corn either. So some may think, visually, they turned out burnt, but I can tell you, they were still delicious!!

I dip one hand in water to minimize meat sticking to me as opposed to my egg. Evenly distribute the meat and then pat it into a football shape.

Take take your “dry hand” and dip the meaty egg in the flour. Shake/Pat away excess flour and with your “wet hand” add to the egg. Again, shake some excess (it’s egg so it’s sticky, do your best) and then add to the breadcrumbs. I take my dry hand and place some crumbs on the top to get a drier hold to roll them. Keeping a wet hand/dry hand helps keep your fingers from turning into “alligator fingers,” or looking like The Thing!

Repeat for the process for all eggs. I set the prepped ones in a ramekin to maintain some semblance of a football shape. They can even sit in the fridge like this for a few hours if you want to do this part ahead of time. They will get flat if left overnight, trust me. They still fry and taste the same though so it’s all aesthetics at that point.

Pic 1 shows my oil at 375F but in all likelihood this could be 350F. I was afraid of my crust burning so I had to use constant movement and basting. I would have basted anyways if set to 350F to help cook the meat side not exposed to the hot oil, again, to ensure even cooking and to cook all the way through.

If you have a deep fryer, I imagine this process is a whole lot easier.

Roll, baste, flip, and get all sides nice and crispy and remove to a paper towel lined plate for draining. I add some salt at this point while the outer oil is still hot.

Repeat for all the eggs you would like to cook. Just note that the temperature will drop while adding more eggs. This may make even cooking of the meat but also risks making your coating soggy. Doing them one at a time helps but I get it that some folks would want to drop two or three at once. Keep an eye in them is all I am saying.

Pro tip: another thing that’d help is letting your meat/eggs come to room temperature prior to frying.

Once you have them all ready to go, slice them in half, garnish, and enjoy. I add a tiny pinch of salt and Aleppo pepper.

I loved how these turned out even with the corn nut issue. Not really an issue, but I’d be interested to see how a blind taste test would’ve turned out. . . Oh darn, I may have to make more!

Chorizo not your thing? Try Italian sausage, breakfast sausage, thinly sliced bacon, whatever you are in to.

I hope you give this a shot with whatever sausage you want and let me know in the comments what you did and how it turned out! Thanks for checking this out and I will hopefully see you for the next Instructable.

Here is a video of my process.