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Food

I Am Mystified and Horrified By the Long Egg

Help, I’ve fallen down a “long egg” hole and I can’t get up.
Screengrab via YouTube user Ancient Girl Kitchen

I’ll just come out and say it. I’ve recently discovered the "long egg" and I am horrified.

The so-called long egg is a log of boiled egg, slender and cylindrical in shape; tubular, like a poster sleeve. Imagine: Taking the ovum from a chicken and mutating it so strenuously, with such unforgiving force, that it suddenly resembles a yolk-filled PVC pipe. Mortifying.

I swear I'm no purist when it comes to how a certain foodstuff is “supposed” to be prepared, but I find a rod of egg to be an upsetting concept. An egg can take many forms: poached or fried, runny or firm, “scrambled" or "omelette.” I would say the possibilities are endless, except, well, they aren’t—there’s a clear ceiling on what an egg can and should do. The long egg shatters that ceiling rather violently.

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MAKE THIS: Scotch Eggs

As Food & Wine reported last year, long eggs have been around since 1974, conceived for the mass market in Denmark by a company called Danæg, who sells the product to this day. It was once created with the aid of an instrument called the SANOVO 6-32. The long egg's use case is pretty clear if you dislodge yourself from the aggressive unpleasantness of its appearance: You can slice evenly sized coins from your boiled egg, rather than the variously sized slabs you'd get from a garden-variety ovular egg. Convenient!

The folks at KnowYourMeme have traced the long egg's recent spate in popularity back to 2013, when a video of long eggs being manufactured in a factory, below, first surfaced. Neither Danæg nor SANOVO responded to immediate request for comment MUNCHIES regarding how it might answer to public revulsion towards the long egg.

I realize, after all, that it's exceedingly poor form to express disgust at the food of a perceived “other," and that it can be unfair to those who were conditioned to, and grew up eating, that dish or ingredient. It's an utterly fatiguing reflex of modern-day food writing, one I never quite understood until I encountered the long egg.

Anyway, want to create your own long egg? Don’t worry, you monster. There's a bustling cottage industry of video tutorials on YouTube that may help.

“Immediately create your long egg at home,” YouTube channel Cookist goads. “Best Long Egg Video | Long Egg Series,” instructs 'KeefCooks'. "How to Make Long Eggs - Long Cylindrical Eggs Made Easy!!!” 'Whats4Chow' says. (Whats4Chow, please stop screaming at me.)

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I must admit my favorite is this joint, below, from 'HungryGuyRecipes,' in which my man appears to pull a cat (?) from a laundry basket (??) before he gets cooking, as an instrumental version of “Dancing Queen” gently hums in the background.

Lovely.

Anyway, most of these videos more or less follow a similar rubric: You separate the whites from the yolks. Whisk these two components separately. Boil some water on the stove. Apply oil a long, tubular glass so the egg has enough lube to just scoot on out of there without incident. Submerge that glass in the water. Pour those whites into the glass and stick a long, thinner glass in its center. Cook the whites. Remove the thinner glass and pour the yolks into the orifice made by the test glass. Wait for the yolks to cook through. Remove from heat. Slice. Serve.

And there you go. Small, sexy, uniform medallions of boiled egg.

If that's your thing, be my freakin’ guest and make a long egg. People have been making them—and presumably enjoying them—for 44 years, after all.