Eggs Hamine

Happy Easter to those who celebrate it!  At Maison de la retro foods, we are supplementing our chocolate eggs with some North African Hamine Eggs.  These came to us via Good Housekeeping’s World Cookery.  The book offers two versions of this recipe.  There is the traditional way:

In Egypt there are special shops selling them; there, after the eggs have been cooked for 3 or 4 hours, they are put under the ashes of a fire and left for as long as 8 hours – this makes them as creamy as butter”

– Good Housekeeping World Cookery

Never mind the pyramids and the Sphinx.  Get me over to Egypt pronto for some of those buttery eggs!!!

Eggs Hamine – The Recipe

The non-traditional version of these eggs is so easy!

 Put the brown outside skins of some onions into a saucepan of ocld water with the eggs and boil for 2 hours or as long as possible.  The onion skins turn the shells of the eggs and the whites brown.  Shell and halve the eggs and serve hot or cold with lemon wedges, salt, pepper and mixed spices”

I cooked my eggs in the slow cooker for a full 8 hours.

Pre – Water

4 hours –  One of the eggs cracked during the cooking but did not ooze out like they do when they crack during normal boiling.

Eight hours!

Note, if you decide to make these in your slow cooker, the onion skins will stain your slow cooker brown along with the eggs.  Get ready to soak and scrub to remove it!

Eight hours and fifteen minutes!

I sprinkled my egg with some salt and some dukkah and dug in!  It was delicious.  There was a faint taste of something – not exactly onion but slightly savoury to the egg which was different to a normal boiled egg.  I would not say that it was buttery  but the white seemed more delicate than a normal boiled egg.

I was also very surprised to see that the onion skin dye had penetrated not only into the white which became a gorgeous soft caramel colour but also the yolk!  This was startling because it is so strange to have a monochrome egg!

These were nice and an interesting experiment but for me, it was a long time to wait for a fancy boiled egg so I will probably not make them again.  If I ever do get to Egypt though, I will be making a breakfast beeline for the Hamine Eggs shops!

Making these eggs might be a  fun thing to do with kids for Easter or for a science project on osmosis.

Happy Easter everyone!