Baked Eggs with Goat Cheese and Prosciutto

Sunday mornings are generally for sleeping late, coffee and the paper, maybe some football if it’s in season. When we lived in New York Sunday mornings often meant brunch out somewhere as well. It is perfectly acceptable in New York to have brunch at 12 or 1pm meaning there is no rush to get up. Here in St. Louis people tend to take the timing of the breakfast/lunch thing more seriously and our favorite brunch places are already packed by 9am. One thing I don’t like to do is wait in line, on a Sunday morning, so we have taken to eating our early afternoon brunches at home when we can.

This cool and cloudy Sunday Dr. Fiance is working hard on grant writing, the poodle we are dog-sitting is following me around like a shadow, and I decided that it was high time that I took a shot making baked eggs for our brunch.

The beauty of something like a baked egg is that it is very simple to put together and like most of the things that I tend to cook, they don’t require an exact ingredient list. Once you have the essentials you can experiment with whatever you have around the house to put in there. The results are creamy, warm and comforting egg whites with an even creamier and heavenly yolk that is very different from both fried, poached or soft boiled eggs.

Here are the essential parts per serving:

1. One Egg, whites and yolk separated
2. 1-2 Tablespoons cream, half and half, yogurt, creme fraiche, whatever
3. Some other secondary ingredient (or two or three) like spinach, tomato, onion, meat, cheese etc.

I went with goat cheese and some Volpi proscuitto (from right here in St. Louis). Then I sautéed some spinach in olive oil and garlic and roasted some cherry tomatoes in olive oil and fresh basil.

To construct your baked egg of awesomeness: simply preheat your oven to 350, while it’s heat up you get your ingredients together. Butter of your ramekin and add in your secondary ingredients. In my case, I lined four ramekins with proscuitto, layered on some goat cheese, then added spinach to two, and tomatoes to two. Next, whisk the cream and egg whites together and pour into each ramekin (one egg per ramekin). Finally, top with the egg yolk. Bake for 20 minutes and then go nuts.

A couple of notes: This makes for a nice light brunch of four servings if you’re serving other dishes. We each ate two of them which was more than enough for brunch without anything else other than a nice baguette to sop up the egg yolks and to cut the richness; the goat cheese made these very decadent.