Ask any guy or girl who had had the opportunity to enjoy life as a Chennai-based high-school kid in the 90's and early 2000 era, and some of their best memories are bound to include roadside bakeries where they had shared hot tea, cakes and egg puffs with their friends with some equally hot high-school gossip after the schools closed for the day (But of course, there are bound to be some outliers who shot straight from school to IIT classes, followed by AIEEE/AIMS classes and a dozen different tuition centers, to whom the bakeries were nearly nonexistent). The tea usually contained enough sugar to keep your pancreas working hard for the next 16 hours and the puffs were sufficiently spicy to ask for another helping of the tea. And when you get back home, the sugar-high tries to keep you awake while the buttery puffs coax you to go to bed and the whole evening passes in a daze of formulae, force-diagrams, conversion reactions and irritating botany.
Six years later, after 4 years of college and 2 years of graduate school, one girl studying at the University of Cincinnati, probably yearning for one of those dazed evenings, demands her friends that the only gifts that she required for her birthday were some egg puffs and some chicken biriyani among other equally simple requests. A year later, on her birthday, we succeeded in fulfilling her yearning for egg puffs and all it took was a mere 45 minutes.
Making egg-puffs at home is a simple task, a cake walk if I may. The real pain in making puffs is the preparation of the puff-pastry, which involves folding and refolding the dough a hundred times and consumes butter by the tons, not to forget the workout that your arms are bound to get. But, these days, ready-made frozen puff-pastry sheets are available in the freezer-sections of your day-to-day supermarkets and once you stock up on a couple of packets, it is pretty easy to bake puffs of your choice and slip back into the old times while you bite into one of them, albeit with the latest article on Multi-Phase Flow from the Journal of Fluid Mechanics in your other hand!
EGG PUFFS (Serves 12)
Set-up Time : 5 minutes excluding sheet thawing time
Experiment Run-Time : 45 Minutes
The Shopping List
Set 1: From the Supermarket (Walmart works!)
Pepperidge Farms Puff Pastry sheets - I packet of 2 sheets
Set 2: The Stuffing
Eggs : 6 large
Onion : 1 large, cut lengthwise into thin strands
Tomato paste : 3 Tbsp or 2 fresh Tomatoes finely chopped
Ginger Garlic Paste : 1 Tbsp
Red Chili Powder : 1/2 Tbsp (0.75 Tbsp if you like it spicy)
Coriander Powder : 1 Tbsp (1.5 Tbsp for the spicy version)
Cumin Powder : 1.5 tsp
Garam Masala/ Kitchen King : 1.5 tsp
Vegetable Oil : 1 Tbsp
Pepper Powder : 1 tsp
Salt : As required
Methodology
1. Take out the frozen puff pastry sheets from the package and thaw them separately for one hour at room temperature.
2. Boil the eggs in water for 20 minutes. Cool them, peel the shells and cut them into halves. Try to keep the cuts pretty so that there is an equal amount of yolk in both the halves. Spread them on a plate, cut side up and sprinkle them with a generous amount of salt and pepper. Keep the egg-halves aside aside.
3. We are now going to make a basic onion-tomato masala for the stuffing. Place a kadai on the stove with some oil and once it heats up, add the ginger-garlic paste to the hot oil. Sauté gently as the paste sizzles in the kadai.
4. Once the raw smell of the paste disappears, add the sliced onions and continue to fry until the onions are near translucent.
5. One by one, add the dry masala powders except the Garam Masala/ Kitchen King, to the onions, incorporating them well with the mixture. Follow it immediately with the tomato paste, half a cup of water and salt. (If using fresh tomatoes, omit the water and sauté them until the tomatoes becomes mushy).
9. Divide the cooled masala into 12 generous portions and with a spoon coated with oil, place one portion on the center of each divided puff pastry sheet.
10. Quickly press one egg half onto each masala bed, cut side down, and as shown below, bring the diagonally opposite edges of the puff pastry sheet over the eggs, fastening them together with a little water.
11. Once you are done with all the 12 portions, transfer the puffs to a greased cookie sheet or baking tray and carefully place them in the oven. You may also bake them in two separate batches if you are not able to do do it all at once.
12. Bake the puffs for 20 minutes or so until they rise up nicely and turn golden-brown on the top.
13. Take them out of the oven (with mittens of course) and transfer them to serving plates. Serve hot with ketchup if desired.
The puffs were a great hit at her birthday party (given that there were only six of us). I tried it again, later for a Christmas-Eve lunch and found that the magic still held. They disappeared within no time and I did not get a single bite. Ever since, I have continued to bake a single puff for myself whenever I felt the need to sink my teeth into one. Like I said, they make filling evening snacks on a day when you have nothing more to do than stare at your lab notes!
2. Boil the eggs in water for 20 minutes. Cool them, peel the shells and cut them into halves. Try to keep the cuts pretty so that there is an equal amount of yolk in both the halves. Spread them on a plate, cut side up and sprinkle them with a generous amount of salt and pepper. Keep the egg-halves aside aside.
3. We are now going to make a basic onion-tomato masala for the stuffing. Place a kadai on the stove with some oil and once it heats up, add the ginger-garlic paste to the hot oil. Sauté gently as the paste sizzles in the kadai.
4. Once the raw smell of the paste disappears, add the sliced onions and continue to fry until the onions are near translucent.
5. One by one, add the dry masala powders except the Garam Masala/ Kitchen King, to the onions, incorporating them well with the mixture. Follow it immediately with the tomato paste, half a cup of water and salt. (If using fresh tomatoes, omit the water and sauté them until the tomatoes becomes mushy).
6. When the mixture thickens, add the Garam Masala/ Kitchen King and mix it well. Continue to heat it on a low flame until it reaches a solid consistency. Cool the mixture for a few minutes.
7. Preheat the oven to 400 °F.
8. As the masala cools off, transfer the thawed pastry sheets to a well floured surface and open them out. Cut each sheet into six rectangles and space them evenly on the surface
9. Divide the cooled masala into 12 generous portions and with a spoon coated with oil, place one portion on the center of each divided puff pastry sheet.
10. Quickly press one egg half onto each masala bed, cut side down, and as shown below, bring the diagonally opposite edges of the puff pastry sheet over the eggs, fastening them together with a little water.
11. Once you are done with all the 12 portions, transfer the puffs to a greased cookie sheet or baking tray and carefully place them in the oven. You may also bake them in two separate batches if you are not able to do do it all at once.
12. Bake the puffs for 20 minutes or so until they rise up nicely and turn golden-brown on the top.
13. Take them out of the oven (with mittens of course) and transfer them to serving plates. Serve hot with ketchup if desired.
The puffs were a great hit at her birthday party (given that there were only six of us). I tried it again, later for a Christmas-Eve lunch and found that the magic still held. They disappeared within no time and I did not get a single bite. Ever since, I have continued to bake a single puff for myself whenever I felt the need to sink my teeth into one. Like I said, they make filling evening snacks on a day when you have nothing more to do than stare at your lab notes!
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