How NYC's Best Scotch Egg is Made

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Hi, my name is Ed Szymanski

and I'm the chef and owner of Lords in New York City

and today we are making our perfect version of a Scotch egg.

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Lord's is our take on a modern British bistro.

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It's a bright, vibrant cuisine,

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not the stodgy gray

and brown British food of a generation ago.

A Scotch egg at its core is a boiled egg wrapped in sausage,

breaded and deep fried.

We serve it with a madras style curry paste,

fresh lamb sausage.

It's a really craveable bite.

First thing we're gonna do is start preparing our eggs.

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We're going to soft boil the eggs.

A bad version of a scotch egg has a hard gray egg yolk

and we like the nice soft runny yolk.

So we're gonna drop these beautiful blue happy eggs

into salted boiling water

and they'll cook for six minutes and 20 seconds.

We make hundreds of these a day, thousands a week,

tens of thousands a year,

exactly six minutes and 20 seconds.

Start the timer the second we drop them in.

[timer going off]

Timer is going off, eggs come out.

Straight into the ice water, please.

Ice water stops the cooking process.

When I say soft boiled, I want a slightly runny yolk.

We don't want it to be liquid

because when you cut into the Scotch egg,

it'll just flow everywhere.

You want it to still have some softness and gooeyness to it,

but you don't want it to be soup.

Yeah, this is perfect.

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Next we're gonna make the curry paste for the sausage.

So the Scotch egg gets wrapped in a sausage.

That's sort of what makes it a Scotch egg.

And ours is flavored with this really nice

sort of like mildly spiced curry paste.

We'll start by sort of dicing the shallot.

We're gonna sweat it in some butter,

sort of a nice amount of shallots.

We use fresh ginger instead of dried.

It's got a really nice bright spiciness to it,

but it's not too intense.

And a couple cloves of garlic as well.

Now we have our vegetables.

So we'll start the pan.

We're gonna melt our butter

and we're gonna toast everything.

So to bring out the aromatic qualities of it.

So get some heat into the ginger and the shallots

and the garlic really start smelling delicious.

And all of this is just gonna flavor our sausage.

This is what makes it so delicious.

You don't want just ground meat, pork or lamb

or whatever it is because it's a chance

to bring more flavor into the dish.

Shallots go in and sort of fry these in the butter.

When you're cooking Alliums in particular,

add salt at the beginning

to draw out some of the moisture.

We've diced the shallots, the garlic and the ginger up

to be roughly the same size,

so they'll cook at around the same speed.

At this stage, it looks like too much butter.

When we add the curry powder,

you'll see all of that excess butter is gonna be needed

to toast the curry powder evenly.

So we can see the alliums and ginger

is starting to brown a little bit around the edges.

That's where we want to stop this process.

And we'll stop it by adding the curry powder.

Sprinkle this in.

So the curry powder is a mix of turmeric,

coriander, brown ginger,

some dried red chili, fenugreek seeds as well.

And it brings this amazing aroma to the dish.

It smells so much more complex and nuanced

than this would be if we just used

a sort of dry pork sausage or something like that.

This adds so much depth of flavor to it.

The [indistinct] here really like does

play homage to the origin of the dish

being the [indistinct].

It's an Indian recipe, the true version of the Scotch egg.

Before it was brought back to UK and then breaded

and sort of made much more bland and boring.

Okay, this is nice and toasted now.

I'm gonna put it in this bowl to chill down.

And once this is cool, we'll mix it in with our ground lamb.

The lamb is true to the origin of the dish,

the [indistinct].

And it's also interesting

to offer something different than the standard pork sausage

that comes with every Scotch egg.

Lamb has a much grassier flavor than pork.

It has a very sort of specific gaminess to it.

American lamb has a sweetness to it as well

that I think works very nicely

with the spice elements in the sausage.

Working this together, start to see the color change.

Add a little pinch of salt.

We'll finish working this together.

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Okay.

And this is ready to wrap our eggs in.

All right, so these are peeled and now we're gonna form

our sausage patties between two pieces of cling film.

If you have a tortilla presser at home,

this is a really good way of doing this.

We want this sausage to be pretty thin.

We're gonna use this to wrap the egg with.

Then we're also gonna fill in any holes with more sausage.

That's one of the best parts of using sausage,

it's quite sticky,

so if something doesn't quite wrap properly, we'll add more.

This is our first patty.

Same thing here.

So at every stage you want to be delicate with the egg

because it's being cooked so that the yolk is still

kind of soft and fudgy on the inside.

Lay this in the middle

and then gently form the sausage all around the egg.

It's like you're tucking a newborn to sleep.

Very gentle.

The sausage is nice and emulsified,

so it will stick together.

We want this to be fully sealed.

You don't want to be able to see the egg through the sausage

because if you do that, the egg's gonna overcook

by the time the sausage is ready.

we're gonna deep fry this entire thing.

It's gonna be at a very high temperature,

so we want to make sure that the egg

is somewhat protected from that by the sausage.

You know, the sausage at this stage is raw,

so it needs to cook, but the egg is fully cooked,

it does not need to cook anymore.

So the ratio of meat to egg is very important.

We don't want the egg to cook any more than it already is,

we just want it to warm through.

Now I got these two little sausages stuffed with egg.

And now we're gonna bread these.

For the dredge, we are going to go into flour once,

then we're to go into a mix of eggs and milk,

then we go into Panko breadcrumbs.

These are nice and crunchy.

This is a classic breading technique.

The flour sticks to the sausage, the egg sticks to the flour

and the breadcrumbs stick to the egg.

We like using Panko breadcrumbs.

They have a really nice texture.

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And we're really coating this nice and evenly.

And that is our egg.

But again, there's just one layer of bread crumbs.

Now everything is ready.

It just needs to be deep fried.

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They'll spend about six minutes in the fryer

and when they're nice and golden brown on the outside,

we'll pull them out and we fry them at 350.

The idea is to balance

this beautifully cooked egg in the middle

so it doesn't need to get any more heat to it,

it just needs to be warmed through.

The sausage, which is raw,

so it needs to be fully cooked through,

and then the breading, which is at this stage raw too,

it needs to get golden brown.

So the thickness of the breading,

the thickness of the sausage is all really important

so that it cooks at the same rate,

so when it's done, everything is hot

and ready at the same time.

Timing here is very important.

You need to make sure you keep an eye on the fryer

and that you pull the eggs when they're golden brown.

The good sign is that when

the exterior is very sort of nut brown,

golden brown on the outside,

that it's cooked on the inside too.

See, at this stage it's still not ready.

All right. [mellow music]

They're looking nice and golden brown

and we're gonna take them out and drain them.

And by the color you can tell,

the breadcrumbs are nice and cooked on the outside,

and then we cut into the sausage,

you're gonna see it's nice and warm, cooked through,

and then that egg should just be

sort of a little bit warmer than body temperature.

So we'll start by plating up the herb creme fraiche sauce,

provide some nice cooling relief

from the spice of the sausage.

And now we'll slice our egg.

You can see that runny yolk on the inside.

We'll finish with a little bit of salt,

crack some pepper over it,

and this is The Lord's Scotch egg.

This looks delicious.

You can see the egg is just set,

the sausage fully cooked

and then the breading around the outside

is perfectly cooked as well, golden brown.

So this ratio is great.

You see the sausage is sort of evenly around the egg

and the egg itself is warm, but not ripping hot.

The spice is warming, it's gingery.

It works really nicely with the crunch of the breading,

that creaminess from the egg,

and then also the creaminess from

the creme fraiche sauce on the bottom,

which has the mint and the chives in it

to keep it really nice and fresh and vibrant.

This has a way of being both a new flavor

but also something very comforting at the same time.

Very familiar.

I could eat a dozen of these.

[Filming Crew] But then look down at them,

hold them towards me and look down at them.

Like these are my children.

[Filming Crew] Great, perfect.