Shirred Eggs Redux

As we've written before, we like eggs. A lot. So we've been trying to cook "coddled" or "shirred" eggs the "right" way for a while. It's a baked egg dish with cream and cheese, pretty simply. We thought that we had blogged about it before, but apparently not. The problem that we've been having it that the mixture in the middle of the ramekin remains totally raw and the edges get way too hard. Here are two sites from which we've pulled a basic recipe. Emeril's for the basic gist of the recipe and this one for the temperature (we used cheddar cheese). The ingredients are different in each of the recipes, but the general concept is the same, so feel free to mix and match.

However, the most important thing that you must do is make a bain-manie or water bath in which the ramekins sit inside the oven. Just put the filled ramekins into a pyrex dish and fill it halfway or so up the ramekins with water. Also, if you want to broil the cheese on top of the dishes, take the broiling time into account or you'll hard cook the yolks. This advice is very much a "do as we say, not as we do", because we blew that step. So we haven't yet perfected the dish, but these instructions should work.

Jim and Peta