Locky's English Playground: 12 Jul 2012

Locky's healthy creamy scrambled eggs
Image from Locky's English Playground

Hello all Playground players, this is my first article on cooking, and our target dish today is scrambled eggs.

A lot of people know how to cook, but many will say one truly knows how to cook if one can cook an egg. Well, I'm not sure about that, but I do think cooking eggs can get really advanced if you want. For me, I choose scrambled eggs.

Now it would be easy to cook scrambled eggs with bucket-load of oil, but that is really unhealthy and will ruin the taste of the eggs. Then how can we cook scrambled eggs with minimal amount of oil?

First, you need to choose oil that is thick enough, like olive oil.

Olive and oil
Image from insearchofsimplicitytoday

Facts:
Saturated fatty acids (lower better): 13.808%
Mono-unsaturated fatty acids (higher better): 72.961%
Polyunsaturated fatty acids (higher better): 10.523%

omega-3 fatty acid / linolenic acid: 1%
omega-6 fatty acid / linoleic acid: 10%

Oleic acid (higher better): 71%

Canola oil is even more healthier, but might be slightly more watery.

Canola and oil
Image from vanessaruns

Facts:
Saturated fatty acids (lower better): 7.365%
Mono-unsaturated fatty acids (higher better): 63.276%
Polyunsaturated fatty acids (higher better): 28.142%

omega-3 fatty acid / linolenic acid: 10%
omega-6 fatty acid / linoleic acid: 22%

Oleic acid (higher better): 62%

Benefits:
Saturated fatty acids is associated with heart diseases and caners.
Mono-unsaturated fatty acids protects against heart diseases.
Polyunsaturated fatty acids such as omega-3 fatty acids lowers risk of heart attacks and breast cancer, and is critical to fetal development (baby development during pregnancy). omega-6 fatty acids lowers the risk of heart diseases.
Oleic acid helps the absorption of omega-3 and prevent the effects of bad cholestrol.

My scrambled eggs in multi-layer stainless metal-alloy wok
Image from Locky's English Playground

After choosing the right kind of oil, you need to understand your wok.

Teflon pans and wok are out of my considerations because they are well-known to cause cancer. Traditional Chinese iron wok is good as it is recommended by the World Health Organization as it helps to prevent iron deficiency, especially for pregnant women, but it usually requires to use of excessive oil. The wok I have at home is a multi-layer stainless metal-alloy wok, it's good as it is scratch-resistant and loses heat very slowly but it's bad as it heats up real slowly, gets overheated later causing the food to get stuck onto it easily, thus lots of work in cleaning afterwards.

Whatever your concerns are, if you know a little physics or the properties of your wok, you can achieve better results in cooking.

Recap:
Alloys, which consists of different elements, conducts heat poorer than elements as the electrons are bouncing off irregularly in different atoms, which explains why the alloy wok heats up more slowly but also loses heat more slowly than iron wok.

Super clean wok even after cooking eggs
Image from Locky's English Playground

Cooking Procedures:

Finally, if you also want to cook great scrambled eggs with metal alloy wok, here are the steps:

heat wok for 2 minutes
add just enough olive oil to moist the wok
wait for the oil to start smoking
off the fire
pour whisked eggs into the wok
draw "S" (almost immediately after pouring) while the egg starts to coagulate
remove scrambled eggs from wok
enjoy!

Following my method, you won't be having a tough time washing up your wok after cooking, and your scrambled eggs is as creamy as it gets!

Thursday, 12 July 2012

Cooking & Health: How To Cook Perfect Scrambled Eggs with Healthy Oil and Good Wok

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