Recipe: Baked Eggs in Chapati Bread Cups
Let me tell you the story of how this recipe came to me: I was watching the Food Network on TV, this amazing South African Chef Siba Mtongana was on cooking brunch for friends and decided to serve something called “Cape Town Tarts”. She lined a muffin tin with slices of parma ham and topped them with cheese and veggies then added eggs, baked them, et voila she had little cups of baked eggs to serve for brunch! It looked so easy breezy, a wonderful way to cook eggs especially for people who didn’t know – like myself- and I thought I could recreate the recipe for my husband using turkey slices instead of parma ham. Then I wished I was able to eat baked eggs like that with chopped mushrooms and coloured capsicums. Then I decided some sort of bread instead of Turkey might work just fan, perhaps some filo pastry, and I got up to the kitchen to experiment.
The first time I tried the recipe was for lunch and I had used two slices of white toast, pounded them down and stretched them out with the dough pin, then stuffed them inside the muffin tin. They worked fine but the egg mix had soaked up the toast a tad too much for my liking and it didn’t feel much like a cup, more like eggy toast. I loved the consistency of the eggs though, they felt like scrambled ones but a tad too firm and not burned so I’ve decided to find something else as a cup. I almost went with filo pastry, but my husband was nagging that he wanted a version of the Kuwaiti eggs and tomatoes (baith o tomat) and then I knew I wanted my eggs -and his- to reside in chapati bread cups.
All I had to do was go to the nearby chapati and samboosa shop and get me some, there is one in the local co-op in every area and each chapati cost about 50 fils each. Now an Indian friend of mine on instagram pointed out that these are called Parantha and not chapati but to everyone else in Kuwait this is what they mean by a chapati hence why I’m going with the Kuwaiti name. Anyways, the chapatis I got were a tad too big so I trimmed the edges and jammed them in the muffin tin.
Two egg chapati cups each, for myself and my husband. Perhaps they don’t look like the tidiest thing but they sure smelled delicious and I knew they would taste good. Now for the fillings, I had my cups filled with cheddar cheese and red and green capsicum, chopped finely. Each cup can’t handle a lot of fillings btw so be careful, a tea spoon of each filling would be more than enough.
My husband wanted one plain cup to be filled with eggs and two drops of white truffle oil and another with chopped tomatoes and cheese. The Kuwaiti style ones usually call for onions but since we were just experimenting we didn’t bother.
Now all we had to do is break up the eggs one by one into a measuring cup. Two eggs total, whisked with salt , freshly ground pepper, and a dash of low fat milk -you could use cream if you prefer-. Whisk them all finely for a few moments and just pour into the prepared cups. How easy it that?
Sprinkle over some more cheese if you like, whatever you fancy. All I had in the fridge was cheddar and mozzarella and they worked fine to me. Place in the middle rack of a pre-heated oven on 180C and bake for exactly 15 minutes. The dishes were washed and the karak tea was prepared in those minutes I waited.
When you take out your baked eggs from the oven you will notice their tops have risen up, like a crown or a soufflé. Then tend to go down quickly though, perhaps its all the air bubbles from the whisking. You don’t even have to wait afterwards, take out the cups immediately and serve!
The karak tea is the perfect accompanying drink to this delicious dish. If you are still not familiar with is, its tea leaves cooked in condensed milk and a bit more of fresh milk with lots of spices: ground cardamom, cinnamon, ginger, star anise, and sugar. Now the good thing about choosing the chapatis is that they hold their ground and didn’t get soaked by the eggs the way toast did.
However, while the outer edges of the toast were crunchy and delicious, the edges of the chapatis were too sharp and crunchy to provide any flavour. Next time I should trim the edges as close to the surface of the tin as possible.
Another good thing about this method of preparing eggs is the no runny surprise part. For a person who doesn’t like the yolk and would be horrified to consume yolk in liquid form, I’m always tentatively digging through scrambled eggs looking for that piece of yolk that wasn’t cooked still. However, you can crack open this good old cup and find nothing but fluffy scrambled-like eggs inside, no surprise yolky liquid running anywhere.
This is a great way to prepare eggs for people who hate to cook and know nothing about cooking, crack whisk and beak and that’s about it. If you struggle with eggs yet you crave them every now and then, try this one out. If you do not mind having turkey or whatever meat slice you consume, perhaps bacon, then it will be even easier and faster. Imagine a baked egg in a bacon cup, topped with a spoonful of Nutella -apparently bacon and Nutella is a big combo thing in Kuwait-. The sky is your limit, and you can rest assured that whatever comes out of that oven, it will be fluffy and most importantly, edible.
