The Wind Attack

I recently went on a 9-day road trip with some friends up the west coast through California, Oregon and Washington. One of our first stops on the trip was Ostrich Land, a roadside attraction in Solvang, California.

Solvang is a small tourist town off the 101 near Santa Barbra. The town is modeled to look like a Dutch village, or at least a parody of one. There are lots of wine tasting rooms for various local vineyards, restaurants and kitschy gift shops. But I wasn’t interested in any of that, but rather in procuring either an ostrich or emu egg.

Perhaps you recall my previous experience cooking an emu egg. My friends went to Ostrich Land and brought back a beautiful dark green emu egg and we made one killer frittata out of it.

On another occasion, I helped my friend Sarah make an emu egg into a goat cheese cake. It was simply emu egg whipped with goat cheese, marscapone cheese, whipped cream, raw honey and a bit of lemon zest and vanilla. It was the “I can’t stop eating this cheesecake” cheesecake.

Finally making the journey to Solvang myself, there were no emu eggs to be had, but they did have some ostrich eggs. Giant, thick, leathery ostrich eggs; essentially what one would imagine a dinosaur egg to look like. So naturally I bought one.

My friend Anna in Portland was excited when she heard the news about the ostrich egg. We we’re already planning to throw a dinner party in Portland upon my arrival later in the week, so we decided the ostrich egg should be part of the menu.

We went to the Portland Farmer’s Market and picked up some fresh ingredients for our dinner party, including a fresh Oregonian white truffle!

We decided to keep the egg preparation simple. We would fry the egg whole, top with shaved gruyère cheese and grated white truffle to finish.

Getting the egg out of the shell whole without breaking the yolk was a bit of challenge and we did it live in front of all of our guests. It was quite the spectacle!

Successfully removed from the shell, we fried it up.

How did it taste? Well… I wasn’t in love with it. There was so much egg white in the pan that by the time the white was all cooked, the yolk had long cooked through.

My fantasy of a runny ostrich egg yolk was spoiled, however the yolk was still rich, smooth and creamy. The egg white on the other hand was like Jello. Strange as it was, everyone ate it up anyways knowing they could brag later about eating ostrich egg!

I think that my experiences with the emu eggs turned out well because the yolk was well blended into the white which resulted in an even creamy texture. I would guess that the ostrich egg would behave similarly.

This isn’t the end of the ostrich egg’s story, oh no. I promised the empty egg shell to Salty Seattle, knowing that I’d be in Seattle just two days later. She told me over twitter that she wanted to make the ostrich egg shell into a fascinator. And oh did she ever!

It was quite the journey for that little (big) ostrich egg!