Anyone for a hard-boiled ostrich egg? They're flying off the shelves - but take 90 minutes to cook



For the past few years, our weekly supermarket shop had been stuck in an embarrassing rut. I love cooking — but like most parents with young children (mine are nine and four), my culinary adventures have been consigned to the back burner for the time being.



Stray from the well-worn family menu of chicken goujons and spaghetti bolognese and you risk tears and tantrums — usually mine — as the children refuse to eat anything with ‘bits’ in, or that ‘looks yucky’.



Each shopping list looks like a pathetic carbon copy of the previous one.

Eggcellent: Mandy's daughter Florence tucks into the boiled ostrich egg

Until last week, that is, when I popped into Waitrose for some milk… and came home with something completely unexpected. Something big.



Something I’d never seen in a supermarket before, let alone thought about buying.



Yes, dear reader, on the spur of the moment I bought an ostrich egg.



At around 16cm tall, 42cm in circumference and weighing in at a hefty 2kg, the ostrich egg is the largest egg of any bird species on the planet.



Waitrose is now selling these monsters at selected branches for a princely £19.95 each.



Waitrose’s ostrich eggs come individually packaged in glossy pink boxes with transparent plastic windows and white rope handles. They looked so incongruous towering over the regular eggs that I just had to have one.

Available from late March through to the beginning of September (ostriches will lay only in warmer weather, apparently), each egg contains the equivalent of 24 large chicken’s eggs — enough to make an omelette for 15. But apart from impulse purchasers like me, who’s really expected to buy one?



The chief egg buyer for Waitrose, Frances Westerman, says: ‘We have lots of customers who like to experiment with their cooking. Ostrich eggs offer the perfect opportunity to add a bit of fun and theatre to a dinner party.’



Apparently, sales of unusual eggs have rocketed over the past few years, although Westerman is cagey about how many ostrich eggs fly off (ahem!) Waitrose’s shelves each week.



‘We get a lot of inquiries for duck, turkey and pheasant eggs,’ she says. ‘We’ve stocked ostrich eggs, too, for a couple of years now, and they have proved pretty popular.’

Supersized: Mandy holds the ostrich egg up to a chicken's which is tiny in comparison

I must confess, I initially bought my egg with my wildlife-mad son in mind, but once it had been taken to school for show-and-tell, and my four-year-old daughter had been reassured for the umpteenth time that there wasn’t a baby ostrich inside, I had to start thinking about what to do with it.



Clarence Court, the specialist egg supplier that provides Waitrose with eggs from a free-range flock of South African Black ostriches in Lincolnshire, suggests serving the eggs soft-boiled, as a whimsical dinner party starter, complete with enormous, French bread ‘soldiers’.





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Mrs Westerman says the extra-light white of the egg makes particularly good meringues. But I’m not quite sure what I’d do with 100 meringues; and I’m not convinced an ostrich-egg Pavlova would fit in anyone’s oven.



Michelin-starred chef Marco Torri of Ristorante Semplice in London’s Mayfair says: ‘Ostrich eggs taste very much like hen’s eggs, so scrambling or making an omelette or frittata from one seems a bit of a waste to me.



'If you boil or fry the egg, however, you keep the scale of it, which is the whole point of serving an ostrich egg. A huge boiled egg or an enormous fried one — with yolk intact — really has an impact.’



I decided to boil ours, but it takes 50 minutes to soft-boil an ostrich egg and 90 minutes to hard-boil it. Placing it into a huge pan full of boiling water isn’t easy either. I had to place it in my metal flour sieve and slowly lower it into the water.

Hard to crack: The egg has been built to withstand the pressure of a 300lb ostrich sitting on it

Lid on, I left it bubbling away, as per instructions, for 90 minutes. I had to keep the pan on the very lowest heat, otherwise the egg banged noisily against its metal sides, sounding as if it was trying to escape.



The shell is as thick as a china cup and built to withstand the pressure of a 300lb ostrich sitting on it. Clarence Court suggests attacking it with a domestic drill, but I opted for sawing at it with a serrated bread knife.



I enlisted my husband to hold the egg still, while I hacked away at it.

The inside of the egg is a surprise. Boiled, the white is much more rubbery-looking than a hen’s egg; although it tastes — as Marco Torri predicted — just like a chicken’s egg.



I rang around the neighbours to invite them over for a taste. Everyone was curious to have a look, but only a brave few would try it. The kids all had a sample but refused to eat a whole slice — even though I offered to slather it in ketchup.

