What makes Dr Ross's Food Experiments Unique?

I'm a trained scientist and as you'll soon find out not a trained photographer or chef, so why not bring some of the scientific approach to the world of food? For me here this means commiting to write up a post about a meal before I've cooked it, having no idea if it'll work as I'll be trying out something new for the first time. This should help you avoid some of my mistakes or even in some rare cases gain some inspiration. It also helps me because I can never remember what did and didn't work.

Vegetarian Scotch Eggs

Someone must have made these before, but I've decided to not let prior knowledgeof the subject cloud my work(part of science is about going up against received wisdom), so I thought I'd just make it up as I go along. A Scotch Egg is a boiled egg wrapped in sausage meat and coated in breadcrumbs and then deep fried. Tomake it vegetarian instead of sausage meat I went for Soya mince.

I boiled eggs and mixed the Soya mince with water and Gram Flour until I got something close to a sausage meaty texture/ consistency. I also added smoked paprika, turmuric and parsley for flavour. I split this mix into three blobs as thats how many eggs I'd boiled... I couldn't decide whether hard or soft boiled would be best so ended up with almost hard boiled.

It turns out that wrapping an egg in fake sausage meat is a lot easier than I though it would be, you just squash the stuff around an egg and your done. Now I didn't bother with bread crumbs as the eggs were already the correct colour. These were put in the oven (its the healthy versio of deep fat frying right?), I went for about 15mins at a high heat and it worked out OK.

Once out the oven these were served this with baby potatoes and salad in a olive oil and lime juice dressing to get my final meal.

Conclusions

This worked quite well, but I guess I wasn't trying out as many new things at once as I have done before; see my old blog here. The gram flour was, as usual, being a little over powering so a different choice of flour would result in a better taste, however I'm not sure everything would bind as well so maybe more/stronger spices could be used. Another problem was the lack of a crispy crust, which I put down to taking the healthy option and cooking in the oven... deep fat frying would be best but I think the eggs would survive shallow frying in a pan. I'd also have prefered to have gotten runny eggs in the final product, so a lot less boiling but presumably much more difficult to wrap in Soya mince.