Recently I became intrigued by the idea of boiling an egg and putting it in ramen. I’d made ramen with eggs dozens of times before but it just didn’t feel right. The first way was just cracking an egg in while the water was boiling but I wanted the egg to cook more. It was pretty satisfying to burst the egg and watch the yolk spill out but I was sort of tired of the method already. Then I tried beating the egg and then pouring it in but the egg just cooked on the bottom of the pot and got stuck there so I had to scrape it all of and it wasn’t pretty. So I thought boiling the egg would the next thing I tried. It seemed pretty tasty and it looks pretty cool when you cut the egg in half and put it in the bowl. I spent a lot of time contemplating if it was worth the effort because it’d take a lot longer than just pouring the egg in and eventually I decided to do it. I was at first only going to boil one egg but I felt a little stupid for filling an entire pot of water just to boil a single egg so I put in another one. Then I turned up the heat and waited for it to boil. I waited for a long time. The water was bubbling and I was waiting for it to start popping like crazy until it finally occurred to me that this was considered boiling. This was when this strange odor began to fill the room. It smelt like smoke. I thought something might be amiss so I searched it up online and they said that burnt eggs come with a bad smell so I was pretty annoyed that I had just potentially wasted two eggs. Even so I continued to take the pot off the stove and then covered it with a lid. Then I waited a little more and took the eggs out of the pot and into cold water. I took them out a little earlier then I should have since I was afraid of burning them. When I removed an egg from the water it smelled pretty awful and I’m pretty sure it’s not supposed to. I got out a spoon and tried peeling it. I thought it’d be easy like peeling a banana but it was more like peeling a grape. It’s a very delicate process, and though I tried my best to be careful, a good chunk of egg still came off when I peeled off part of it. So I gave up on getting a perfect egg and just wildly tore off all of the shell. In the end my egg looked like somebody sat on it. Afterwards I washed it under running water to get off all the remaining shell pieces that might’ve stuck on and it opened a small hole to see if it looked normal inside. It did, so I hesitantly took a bite. It tasted normal. Then I repeated the process with the other egg. That one turned out much better. Not perfect, but still mostly retaining its oval shape. Then I cut it in half like I’d seen other people do and set it aside. I also cut the deformed egg in half as well, but that just ended up making it look more pathetic than it already was. I quickly cooked the ramen, set it on the table and put the boiled egg in. It didn’t float like in the pictures which was pretty disappointing. Then I ate it. And that’s when the fact I had been trying to avoid became unavoidable: I don’t even like boiled eggs. I decided this wasn’t worth the effort and I would never be doing it again.
Today I instead decided to return to the beating eggs method. I had thought about the eggs sticking to the pot for a while and wondered how I could have failed so terribly. Then I remembered this one video. It was a video of Studio Ghibli behind the scenes. And in it was Hayao Miyazaki cooking ramen for his hungry and overworked team. He got an enormous pot and put like ten packets of ramen in and poured in a gallon or so of water and about a million seasoning packets. But the part that made me realize what I had done wrong was when Miyazaki got his coworker to slowly pour in a bowl of beaten eggs while he stirred the noodles around. It’s an odd thing to remember. I was in class when the video somehow entered my thoughts. I must have been hungry. Anyway, this made me wonder if that was why my egg had stuck to the bottom of the pot. Later when I got home I made ramen like usual and beat some eggs. This time I slowly poured it in while stirring the broth around. The result: it was alright. The egg was all white and looked kind of sad. It was also pretty tasteless. So I guess next time I’ll spill a ton of salt on the egg and see if it turns out better that way.