Saturday 26 September 2009

Egg Stream


I have a passion pending towards an obsession for poached eggs. I have already said too much about the fragile pod of gooey goodness, silently contained yet secretly yearning for an encounter with a sharp object, preferably laid on top of rice, like here.

This week I was in London with Arabeschi di Latte, as part of a pop up egg bar titled ‘Egg Open Source’. The Arabeschi girls are a design-based creative group that experiments with new design concept focusing on food fascination and power of food to create situations and relationships. Like egg and mayo, food and design go hand in hand, and this week was all about the egg; a perfectly designed shape and a symbol of life and death.

We set up shop in Studio TooGood's ‘The Hatch’, a Memphis group style inspired environment, and the perfect breeding ground for eggs. Upon arrival we unpacked our things and made the space our new home for the coming week.

We sourced the eggs from London’s farmers market, Marylebone and Swiss cottage, to ensure our eggs were the freshest eggs from local happy chickens.

The concept was this: We begun by offering two typical Italian egg recipes; a zabaione and Uovo in Camicia, literally translating to egg in a shirt, essentially a poached egg on toast.

People order a dish, receive a kit and a recipe and prepare their egg. This is when the fun starts, as people begin to interact with the egg, with the recipe, and with each other, all of which happens without them noticing. Before leaving the participants leave us their favourite egg recipe.

A universal staple foodstuff, we have now a collection of egg recipes and egg making techniques from around the globe; sweet, savory, raw, baked, cooked, mashed, and then some.

Similar to an egg, our bar evolved and changed as a direct response to people’s input, participation and dialogue. By the end of the week we were offering a total of 6 different egg dishes picked from contributed recipes.

Food is swell and turns out people really love eggs. Some had prepared 3 different recipes in one go, others came in everyday. All Left the space having had a good time and a really good egg.

I need a couple of days before I look at one let alone eat it, but I’ll be ok, I have to. I need to get started now that I discovered so many new egg recipes.

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