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A Fresh Take on ‘Put an Egg on It’
In the span of a decade, the egg — embellished as the “farm egg” on many menus — has become an easy and cost-effective way for chefs to telegraph a connection to a local farm, whether real or imagined.
Eggs show up simmered in pools of cream to be eaten with toast, floating in bowls of hipster ramen and sliding off cheeseburgers made with grass-fed beef.
I started to feel like Bernie Sanders when I saw one on a menu: “Enough with the farm egg already!”
Then I found myself staring down at a sophisticated bowl of smoky, soupy grits with an egg on top at the Barn, the premier restaurant here at Blackberry Farm, 30 miles south of Knoxville, Tenn.
Cassidee Dabney, the executive chef, invented the dish last summer when she had a sous-chef smoke some chicken wings for a Fourth of July barbecue contest among the staff. At the same time, she was trying to brew a superrich chicken stock fortified with extra bones and chicken feet.
“Things happened, and I completely forgot about those wings,” she said. They were too smoky for the contest, so she threw some into the stock. “It was a happy little accident,” she said. “Now we steep them in broth almost like tea.”
Her dish starts with a strain of corn called Bloody Butcher. She grinds it fresh and simmers the grits in three parts water to one part milk. An egg — preferably gathered from nearby fields during the late spring and summer, when the chickens have lots of bugs to eat and the yolks turn deep orange — gets a sous-vide bath and then goes into the bowl.
Next comes a ladle or two of smoky chicken stock, punched up with a little lemon juice. She spoons on chicken-skin cracklings, chopped peanuts that have been candied in syrup and black pepper, and grits that she has frozen into a block and then shaved into a deep-fat fryer, Fritos style.
A little sliced radish and some chives offer contrast.
“It’s such a sneaker dish,” she said. “You get this bowl of brown stuff with an egg, and you’re like, ‘This looks terrible.’ But then you taste it, and you can’t believe how good it is.”
I will never make fun of a farm egg again.
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