Salted (uh, coagulated) egg nog

let's funk up your nog

Hi, clowns!

It’s the middle of December, and most of you are tapping your foot on the ground, pointing at your watch, saying, “Dannis. It’s prime noggin’ season. Where the fuck are the eggnog shenanigans?”

Hold your horseys, because today’s your day. Yes, we’re joshin’ around with the delectable egg beverage that’s not typically consumed for sick gains. I guess technically all raw eggs are drinkable, but an egg drinking challenge is for the day when I want to call in sick for work from the emergency room.

Eggnog, in general, is hilarious. First of all, it’s not often you’re handed a cup of egg and cream mixed together and expected to sip on it. Second of all, it’s called “nog.” And thirdly, not only does it have cream and eggs in it, sometimes it’s fortified with so much hard alcohol that you can get trashed by consuming it. Imagine going on a rager fueled by eggs, cream, and enough brandy to put grandpa to sleep.

Then imagine throwing that all back up.

This week’s idea is thanks to Davida, who had been sitting around, thinking deeply about eggnog as she often does (she won’t admit it, but it’s her true passion).

Apparently, she was also thinking about her other true passion, salted egg yolks, because she shouted, “Why don’t you make salted egg yolk eggnog? Salted eggnog!”

Okay, so this one’s going to take a little explaining, especially if you’ve never had salted egg yolk.

You can ignore this part if you feel I’m eggsplaining too much (bing bong), but I feel like salted egg yolks do need a little bit of an intro. So here in the United States, it is trendy to make your sweets salty, such as caramel, ice cream, brownies, and cookies. I could have just tossed some salt into eggnog and shouted, “Hey, fuckers, look what I did! Get me a YouTube show!”

But salted egg yolks are something else entirely. They’re an ingredient that’s big in Asian cooking. Oddly enough, they’re not really a thing in Korean food, so I never got the chance to tried salted egg yolk items until the past few years, when Davida and I got some Vietnamese pies with entire salted egg yolks inside them (at Costco of all places). She immediately became smitten with them.

(Related: These salted egg-flavored salmon skins from a company called Irvin’s are amazing. The idea sounds real weird, but trust me, they’re good.)

Salted egg yolks are exactly what they sound like; these are egg yolks that have been separated from the white, salt-cured, then slowly heated, until they reach sort of a hard-boiled yolk texture.

We got some from the Chinese supermarket, which is my go-to grocery store for offal and other cool shit (see the three-foot footlong, bloody mary float, and cinnamon toast bungholes for more). These were a duck egg version, which have this really cool, butterscotch candy color to them.

I shoved one in my mouth (ass) and felt my cholesterol levels rise immediately. Despite the fact that they’re salt salt-cured, these egg yolks aren’t too salty, but they do have an interesting flavor, almost like hard cheese. And just like here, in Asia, some flavors trend, and salted egg yolk is one that’s had a really big boom recently.

Anyway—this is a long explanation for what Davida wanted, but salted eggnog is the East-West fusion that Davida thinks the world always needed, aside from our holy matrimony. Ho, ho, ho, dickholes!

Davida suggested I use the shaken eggnog recipe posted on Serious Eats’ website, because it doesn’t need much stuff to make, plus it’s not fussy.

All it requires is whole milk, heavy cream, eggs, sugar, rum (or brandy, we went with brandy), and ground nutmeg for garnish. That seems simple enough, but of course, there was the issue of the egg yolks being cooked and whole—they wouldn’t dissolve on their own with vigorous shaking. So I thought, why not just blend the whole thing in my Nutribullet?

So I tossed a few egg yolks into the Nutribullet cup along with the egg whites from two raw eggs.

Then I added in the sugar, cream, milk, and brandy under the gang’s silent and mildly menacing supervision.

After that, I let the Nutribullet rip.

Everything was going to plan. The cats were terrified of the blender, I showed Mr. Bee how it was all going, things couldn’t get any better. Davida and I were about to get ripped on an egg and full-fat milk drink and if we were feeling wild, we could chuck garbage out of our window onto the sidewalk while we were doing it. Nothing you guys probably don’t do in the middle of a work week.

I figured that since there might be some solids from the egg yolks leftover, it couldn’t hurt to strain the eggnog for some errant chunks, so I got out my busted-ass sieve and started pouring out the finished ‘nog into a second vessel.

It’d been a year since I’d had any eggnog, but was it supposed to be this chunky when you make it fresh?

Because holy shit, this stuff looked just like it would coming back up. Sweet bouncing baby Jesus. What the hell? Had I accidentally invented eggnog cottage cheese or something? The entire batch was clotted up, and I must have made an involuntary grunting noise, because Davida came over to see why I was cursing to myself.

She made a disgusted face and walked away.

“Uh,” I said, “Babe, is it okay if I write about eggnog ricotta this week instead?” I looked at her, hoping she’d find that concept substitution acceptable, but she really wanted this salted eggnog to happen for you all.

I dragged my finger through the solids. They tasted boozy, and like eggnog, but it’s been a really long time since I realized I couldn’t identify a food’s basic composition. I couldn’t figure out for the life of me if this was coagulated milkfat, brutally agitated egg whites, or a combination of both.

Heh. “Brutally agitated egg whites” sounds like a menu description at a fine dining restaurant in the middle of nowhere, Norway. Metal.

There was some leftover liquid that strained out of the coagulated eggnog, so I poured it into our finest Golden Girls wineglass that says, “Live like Rose, Dress like Blanche, Think like Dorothy, Speak like Sophia,” which are words I live by every day.

I sprinkled a little nutmeg on top to give it that little potpourri scent. Davida muscled me aside and insisted on taking the first sip from the glass, because this whole event was her idea. She paused, drank a little more, and made a thoughtful face. Then she handed it over.

I took a sip. Huh. It tasted exactly like eggnog (which I was weirdly impressed by, considering this wasn’t a heat-treated recipe), but its body was thin and watery. Ah, yes, the elusive skim eggnog whey. Incredible. The salted egg yolk flavor came through ever-so-slightly, with a tiny Parmesan aftertaste. It wasn’t bad, considering the visually disturbing clot that I’d filtered out of it.

I stood there with my arms crossed, trying to figure out what I should do next. These experiments are always really fun, but sometimes things don’t turn out quite the way I want, which can be frustrating. Especially if I’ve got a precise vision of what should have happened.

“Well?” Davida said, looking at me. “Aren’t you going to try it again?”

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Yup, this one’s a two-parter. But hey, at least I got a nasty-looking mass of maybe-ricotta-maybe-whipped-egg-whites sitting in the fridge, reeking of booze. Our fridge needs to be impounded.

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