It has been a really quiet week for me (this flu was no joke). My cooking has been limited to soup, eggs, and a single batch of bread. The worst of it has been that my sense of taste was dampened by the congestion and continues to somewhat muted. So even if I had the energy for ambitious cooking or preserving, it would have been lost on me.
Because things are tasting flat, I’ve been reaching for highly flavored things like sauerkraut and pickles, trying to replace nuance with pungency. Yesterday’s simple lunch was particularly satisfying.
I pulled a jar of young sauerkraut out of the fridge and forked out a generous layer onto a place. I cracked two eggs into a hot, buttered skillet and cooked until the whites were set but the yolks were still runny (my father calls this “over easy, hold the wiggle”). Once the eggs were done, I slide them out onto the sauerkraut, and then topped the whole thing with several drops of Alana’s excellent hot sauce.
The eggs warmed the cold kraut slightly and the hot sauce added extra zip. Together, that plate of food offered both high flavor and healing nutrition. Here’s hoping both my energy levels and my sense of taste will be back to normal by next week!
I love both of these things, but I’m not sure how I’d like them together. Maybe I’ll have to try it?
When I’m sick I crave kimchi!
Nice! That is exactly the way I like my eggs. (Okay, I like them a ton of other ways too, but the no runny white in fried eggs is still key.) Sauerkraut is such a great idea! I occasionally do a quick cabbage saute with sriracha to eat with eggs, so I have an inking of sauerkraut’s potential for greatness. here 🙂 Feel better soon!
I am going to try making sauerkraut this year. Does it matter what container I do it in. In other words do I need to buy a crock?
No crock required for making sauerkraut. Here’s how I do it, one quart jar at a time. http://www.seriouseats.com/2011/12/in-a-pickle-small-batch-sauerkraut.html
Great idea. I’ve put kraut in a breakfast burrito before, but for some reason I never thought to eat eggs and kraut without the tortilla.
Put the whole thing on top of a slice of that bread you made, toasted, with a thin layer of ketchup on it and you get some bready goodness with some sweetness from the ketchup, and you have one of my favourite lunches!
I always eat my eggs over kimchi – never thought of kraut. This will be on my plate very soon. I purchase my kraut at the Hutterite colony in Minnesota.It is the best I have ever had. Thanks for sharing !
That looks strangely appealing to me for some reason. I am one of those that never outgrew the food touching phobia.
Hope you feel better soon. The plague has been bad this year.
I have a hard time frying or baking eggs to that perfect sweet spot – whites done, yolks thick but runny. I recently rediscovered poaching, thanks to Martha Rose Schulman’s columns in the New York Times. Now I have perfect eggs every time, in just a few minutes! I am now a poaching evangelist – poached eggs over roasted root veggies, steamed spinach, and now I will try sauerkraut.
Feel better soon, the plague/flu laid me out for 3 weeks! And it still took time for the energy to come back
Yum! Had an oatmeal/sauerkraut/egg bowl with hot sauce for breakfast – a great combo, almost like a simple version of bibimbap, one of my favorite winter dinners.
I stumbled across this article while trying to prove to a friend that the notion of “kraut & eggs” was not crazy. I make my kraut the old way (salt + cabbage + time), though I add 1-1/2 tsp whole caraway seed, 2 bay leaves, 1 tsp crushed red pepper and 5-7 cloves garlic per head of cabbage in the fermenter. This particular kraut plays well with over easy eggs, Valentina hot sauce and fresh oregano. Pair that with a nice Porter or Stout for an unbeatable breakfast!
Kraut and eggs is definitely not crazy! And yours sounds delicious!
I love sauerkraut and I love eggs, never thought to combine them into one dish in the morning! I’ll definitely be adding tons of hot sauce, can’t have eggs without it. Thanks so much for sharing, can’t wait to try this at home!