Baked Quail Eggs

For whatever reason, quail eggs are really easy to find in NYC.  Cheap too. For whatever reason, I'm intrigued by the prospect of eating eggs that don't come from chickens, especially if their visually distinct and/or not from an avian. Lemme give you a sense of scale compared to a chicken egg.  

Kinda cute, right?

They seem to be as versatile as chicken eggs, although you do need more of them.  Just take any recipe with eggs, multiply the amount you need by 6, and you'll be golden. For example, most quail egg omelette recipes call for 20. It's not really worth in for day to day cooking though, since a carton costs as much or a bit more than a carton of chicken eggs. This particular dish is a French hors d'oeuvre, of which there are a billion variations.  

Frozen pie crust

Carton of quail eggs

Black lumpfish caviar

Price Range: $10 - $20

You could always splurge on caviar that isn't disgusting, but obviously it'll cost more. If you're going to spread fish embryos over quail embryos, you might as well go all out, amirite? To start I need to make some mini pie crusts.

Press baking parchment into a muffin tin and put uncooked crust into it, bake for 15 minutes at 450.

Crack an egg or two (which ever fits) into the shell.  By the way, cracking these things is kind of difficult because the shells are kind of thik.  You have to sort of forcefully slap them with the blade of a butter knife and crack them in half. 

Spread baking parchment over a baking sheet and place the crusts on it.  Return it to the oven at 350 for 10 minutes.  Remove them from the oven and spread some caviar on them.

Well, this is…unremarkable.   Apparently quail eggs taste just like chicken eggs.  It’s like a poached egg in crust.  Not bad at all but nothing special.   It’s a bit like walking 3 city blocks to a restaurant, spending $15 on a semi-exotic sounding sausage dish and getting a regular hot dog with some soy sauce on it. Maybe experimenting with different toppings would improve it. The caviar is like hateful little balls of salt and I really can't recommend it. In all fairness, lump fish caviar from Key Food probably isn't the best around. Hot sauce probably would have been better. Oh well.  If nothing else you can now rest assured that there’s no reason to shy away from quail eggs. 

Stay queer!