I LOVE a scotch egg! Warm, cold, in a restaurant, at a picnic, doesn't matter. They're so simple to make and can provide bundles of joy - especially is you get a runny yolk! Mmm.
As we are during the height of Picnic Season, they have been a big seller on The Cleveland Arms takeaway menu during the lockdown. We have many regular customers who are coeliac or intolerant to gluten - which, unfortunately a picnic box is mostly just a box of! - so I started thinking of some simple Gluten-Free alternatives we could offer. When I teamed up with Healthy Living Ellie, we decided to make these Gluten Free Scotch Eggs so we had a picnic item to take across to the park and share with our friends after a full day of recipe testing.
This recipe uses Gluten Free Cornflakes, blitzed into breadcrumbs (an ingenious idea from Ellie!) and Gluten Free Flour as the coating, as well as Heck 97% Pork Sausages, which are naturally Gluten Free. It's worth checking the packet still, but most sausages with a meat content of 80% or above will be gluten free. I personally don't buy sausages with any less of a meat content as I want them to be full of good things and not bread, rusk or fillers!
You can experiment by using different type of sausages such as chicken or venison; or adding other flavours into the meat such a spices, mustard or chorizo. They're extremely versatile and a little change goes a long way!
One thing to remember: the cooking time of your eggs will depend on their size, if they were room temperature to start with etc. I usually go for 3 mins 30 seconds for a medium egg. You can push that to 4 mins if they're slightly larger to get a runny yolk. Or just have them fully hard boiled and cook for 5 or more minutes. We made ours hard boiled so that we didn't ruin our photo set with dripping yolk and so that we could share them more easily at our picnic!
Gluten Free Scotch Eggs
Makes 4 large scotch eggs
Prep time: 20 mins
Cook time: 20 mins
Special Equipment Needed:
Deep Fat Fryer
Blender
Ingredients:
6 Eggs
1 Bowl worth GF cornflakes (50g)
1 Pack of Heck GF 97% pork sausages
100g GF Flour
Method:
Bring a pan of water to the boil & carefully place 4 eggs into the water to boil for 3min 30 second
Remove the pan and run it immediately under cold water to cool the eggs (do this whilst you prep the rest - or pop the eggs into a bowl of ice water to avoid continuously running the tap!)
Get 3 wide bowls out and pour the flour into one
Whisk the remaining 2 eggs into another
Use a blender to grind the cornflakes up into breadcrumbs and tip this into the final bowl
Remove the skin from the sausages and mix all the sausage meat together
Divide the sausage meat into 4 balls
Carefully peel the boiled eggs out from their shell and roll them in the flour
Take one ball of sausage and flatten in your hand as evenly as possible
Place one egg into the flattened sausage and carefully wrap it around the egg, ensuring you fully cover the egg with no holes
Roll this ball in the flour, then beaten egg and then cornflakes, repeat until all eggs are coated
Use a deep fat fryer at 180 degrees to brown the eggs for 5 mins until golden.
Pop the eggs into a preheated oven at 200 degrees for 10 mins to ensure the sausage meat is cooked through
Serve!
Healthy Swap: you can make these healthier, by baking them instead of frying them! Enjoy your eggs as a snack, at a picnic, or impressing guests with satisfying yolk burst....and remember, anyone can cook!