This is the first dish that I fully developed myself through several iterations over the past year. It is an “egg” made of a gelled vanilla cream and a passionfruit and mango yolk served with lemon almond toast.

The idea for this dish was the impetus for my wanting to develop an entire tasting menu. Developing a dish like this taught me a lot about how difficult it is to balance textures and flavors to produce a satisfying dish. Initially, there was no toast and the texture was predominantly gel and thick liquids, which is not a particularly appealing texture on its own.

This dish originally came to me while I was riding in a car with a friend after brunch one day around Christmas 2020. They had fried eggs as part of their meal and, for whatever reason, the idea occurred to me that it might be amusing to have something that you would normally start your day with be one of the last dishes of a meal. However, a fried egg isn’t necessarily the best dish to put at the end of a multi-course meal. So, I started pondering how to make it something sweet so it could be served as a pre-dessert or dessert.

When I got home, I looked in my pantry for ideas. I figured that the yolk would likely require me to use spherification, a technique that was still relatively new to me at the time, and the white would need to use some sort of gelled dairy product. Flavoring the dairy base with vanilla and using a high-fat dairy product to better capture the flavor was the first thought. I knew I wanted to use vanilla beans, hoping the seeds would give the appearance of black pepper and give a deeper vanilla flavor than using an extract.

I knew that tropical fruit typically paired well with vanilla, so my mind initially went to mangos. I consulted The Flavor Bible and The Flavor Matrix for other pairings that might be interesting and feasible to produce the desired effect, but I settled on mangos. When I was at the co-op, there were no mangos that looked particularly ripe, but I noticed they had passionfruit in stock and grabbed a few out of curiosity.

My first attempt used only passionfruit and a little sugar in the yolk, producing a rather tart yolk. It wasn’t entirely unpleasant, but wasn’t what I had in mind. The reverse spherification process also did not go as well as I had hoped, entirely due to user error. The white base used whole-milk, an entire vanilla pod, some sugar, and agar agar. The flavor was lovely, though I used too high a percentage of agar agar and the result was a very chewy and brittle gel.

For my second attempt, I decided that something with a crispy texture would be beneficial to the overall experience of eating the dish. And besides, more often than not, I find myself making or being served toast with fried eggs. I made a simple quick bread and flavored it with almond extract. I used a mixture of 33% passionfruit juice to 67% keitt mango juice and added a little xanthan gum to give the viscosity of an egg yolk. The keitt mango has a sweeter flavor than many mango varieties and proved to be the perfect balance to the more tart passionfruit. The only change made to the white was using less agar agar in order to produce a softer egg white.

Just before serving, I toasted thin slices of almond bread in a little European butter until it was nicely crisp on both sides. My partner sampled this iteration with me and made the observation that something acidic or citrusy in the toast would help tie it in better with the fruit flavors in the egg yolk.

The next, and most recent, attempt was at Thanksgiving for my family. Using the recommendation my partner made, I prepared two loaves of almond bread with the addition of lemon zest in the batter and a slight squeeze of the juice. The eggs I made exactly as I had for my partner. It was also a good opportunity to practice making multiples of a dish, especially one that requires some last-minute prep before presenting it to the diners.

I increased the amount of toast from two slices to four because 1) this was a snack rather than a dish in a tasting menu, and 2) the size of the egg seemed to warrant more toast with which to eat the egg. The end result was almost exactly how I imagined them when I first conceived of the dish nearly a year prior. My family was rather amused with the dish. My grandfather still comments to me every week when I visit with him that he couldn’t believe he wasn’t eating an egg.

The recipe below is as it is in my notebook. When I serve this as part of a multi-course meal, I will make the eggs smaller and only serve two pieces of toast. I will revisit this recipe to provide weight measurements for the liquid ingredients in the lemon almond bread and updated sizing recommendations for the egg white and yolk.

“Egg & Toast” Recipe

1. Prepare the alginate bath
• 500g distilled water
• 5g sodium alginate
Mix water and sodium alginate with an immersion blender until no clumps remain. Cover and refrigerate for 24 hours for the bubbles to dissipate.


2. Prepare the ‘yolk’ mixture
• 4-6 passionfruits (or enough for 75g juice)
• 1 large or 2 medium keitt mango(s) (enough for 150g juice)
• 1.85g calcium lactate
• 0.925g xanthan gum
• 5g granulated sugar
Whisk together sugar, calcium lactate, and xanthan gum (the sugar helps the other powders dissolve without clumping). Juice the passionfruits and mango(s). Pass the juices, individually, through a fine sieve to remove any pulp. Combine the powder and sugar mixture with the juices using an immersion blender until no clumps remain. Cover and refrigerate for 24 hours.


3. Lemon almond bread
• 270g all-purpose flour
• 200g granulated sugar
• 3g salt
• 15g baking powder
• 1 egg
• 1 cup whole milk
• 1 tbsp almond extract
• 1/3 cup canola oil
• 1/2 tbsp Meyer lemon juice
• Zest from 1 Meyer lemon
Mix the dry ingredients in one bowl, and the wet ingredients in another. Gradually add the wet ingredients to the dry ingredients until fully incorporated and no dry clumps remain. Line a 9x4x4″ pullman loaf tin with greased parchment paper and fill approximately 3/4 full. Bake at 350°F for 40 minutes or until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean. Set on a rack to cool completely in the tin.


4. Prepare vanilla gel
• 1 vanilla bean pod
• 300g whole milk
• 10g raw cane sugar
• 2.25g agar agar
Cut vanilla pod in half length wise. Scrape seeds into milk in a small saucepan and add empty seed pod halves, along with sugar. Slowly heat to 210°F, remove seed pod halves, and whisk in agar agar. Hold the mixture at 210°F for 10 minutes, stirring constantly but gently to prevent the mixture from burning. This is necessary to activate the agar. Pour into a quarter sheet tray, cover with plastic wrap, and place in the refrigerator to set.


5. ‘Egg white’ discs
• 1 quarter sheet tray of vanilla gel (previously prepared)
Use a 3.75″ diameter round cutter to cut 6 discs in the vanilla gel. Carefully remove surrounding gel. Re-cover and place in refrigerator.


6. ‘Eggs’
• 6 vanilla gel discs (previously prepared)
• Sodium alginate bath (previously prepared)
• ‘Yolk’ mixture (previously prepared)
• Distilled water
Carefully transfer one vanilla disc to each plate. Set the alginate bath along with two bowls containing distilled water in a line.
Carefully, but quickly, pour 1 tbsp of the yolk mixture into the alginate bath. Once it sinks to the bottom, carefully stir using a spherification spoon without touching the ‘yolk’ itself. After about 30-60 seconds, carefully remove the ‘yolk’ and place it into the first rinsing bath. Again, stir without touching the ‘yolk’. Rinse the ‘yolk’ to the final bath, let it drain for a few seconds, and place it on a vanilla disc. Repeat this until each disc has a ‘yolk’.


7. Assembly
• 6 ‘eggs’ (previously prepared)
• 1 loaf lemon almond bread (previously prepared)
• Knob of European butter

Cut six 1/2″ slices of bread—do not use the heels. Melt butter over medium-low heat and toast the bread until each side is crispy and nicely browned. Cut the toast on the diagonal and place two triangles of toast on each plate.

Serve immediately with a fork.

I recommend breaking the ‘yolk’ using a piece of toast and allowing it to ooze out a bit. Bites should be taken, with the toast, sampling just the yolk, just the white, and a mix of both.