Clacking eggs

One of the birthday gifts that my sweetie gave me this year was a Clack Egg Cracker. For those of you unfamiliar with this marvel of German engineering, the Clack is used to cut the top off your hard (or soft) cooked eggs. You place the stainless steel cap on the top of your egg and drop the 70 gram ball down the 16 centimeter shaft. Then 0.181 seconds later, the ball, having attained a velocity of 1.77 meters per second, hits the egg shell with 0.6867 newtons of force, leaving a perfect crack around the top without damaging the rest of the egg.

With this gadget, it becomes relatively easy to make Arpège eggs, the dish created by Alain Passard for his Parisian L'Arpège Restaurant. The cleverly engineered concoction consists of a seasoned egg yolk, coddled its shell and combined with a mixture of crème fraîche, sherry vinegar, chives, and maple syrup. It is a surprisingly delightful dish that I first sampled at David Kinch's Manresa Restaurant. Last weekend, I tried my hand at making some Arpège eggs. Here are the results:

Egg yolks in shell seasoned with fleur de sel and ground white pepper with chives:


Coddling the eggs:


Voilà!