Coat Not with Eggs

Flour glue: So good Mr. Spider will spin his web with it

There is a Balinese-like terrace along Lorong Chuan with a particularly splendid air-well: sunbirds have for years been building their twiggy-like nests amidst the leafy green canopy of bamboo. And you can stand by the windows on the third level to watch, at eye-level, mummy birds feed their gluttonous chicks.

You can even watch the newly grown adult female and male bring in the twigs to thatch together their love nest. And you’ll soon realize that it’s their weavings skills that hold all the twigs together: No glue required what so ever!

That cannot be said when I’m making meatballs. The recipes where I’ve succeeded in pan frying the meatballs without them disintegrating during the cooking process all include adding a fresh egg into the mince - just as breadcrumbs won’t fall off the lamb cutlets when the chunks of meat on t-bone are first coated with the beaten contribution freshly laid by some well-feathered hen.

So imagine my surprise when the definitive Italian cookbook, “The Silver Spoon”, recommends that I hold half a kilogram of minced beef together with four tablespoonfuls of béchamel sauce! Well, surprise, surprise: it worked! And it did even after adding 250g of freshly grated parmesan into the mix of meat. And those few spoonfuls of beige creamy gravy and the heavily-handed inclusion of fragrant cheese almost transform this meatball dish into a close encounter with yummy lasagna, minus the pasta.

For those of you who are into kitchen science, the béchamel miracle is no miracle indeed. For what goes into the milk-and-butter base in this sauce is lots of fine grains of flour dissolved and then thickened by heat. So it actually works on the same principle of adding dissolved corn starch to bulk up the rich gravy that will, when generously poured, splendidly cling onto the roasted rack of juicy, tender lamb.

So here’s great news if the doctor’s advised you to lay off the eggs and the béchamel sauce: you can cook the flour in water till it thickens, and use that as the gel that holds the minced meat together. And the bread crumbs as crusty coating over the rack of nicely pinked lamb. To top that, the prize for this substitution is that the flavours from the egg or béchamel are no longer there to distract from the fundamental experience of savoring the meatiness of the dish.