Sous Vide Cottage Cheese Egg Bites

O. M. G.

I did my first cook with the Anova Nano (not an affiliate link), and I’m hooked already.

I watched this video on the Sous Vide Everything channel (which I highly recommend) and decided I needed to try this when I finally got an Anova of my own. I went with the cottage cheese version, since I can’t find any of those fancy/Brazilian cheeses here in the boonies. Also, I like cottage cheese.

I prepped all my veggies and bacon, tracked down my old canning jars and cleaned them up, whizzed up the eggs and cottage cheese with my super cheapo immersion blender ($20 at Walmart), and put it all together.

This was the first time using my new Anova Nano, and the ‘custom’ bin I cut up for it. Worked like a charm!

Admittedly, waiting that hour and change while the water heated and the eggs cooked was painful. I can be impatient. But it was SO worth the wait!

I cracked open a jar as soon as I could hold it, and oh my, was it worth the wait!!

The egg/cottage cheese mixture cooks up smooth and firm – but not hard. It’s a nice soft texture. I was amazed by how much I could taste the cottage cheese! I suppose I should have expected that, since 50% of the mixture was cottage cheese, but it caught me off guard. And since I LOVE black pepper on my cottage cheese on any given day, the extra grind of pepper on top before cooking was a perfect touch.

I found the onions quite present – so if you’re not a big fan of onions, maybe just do a half instead of a whole one. The bit of garlic added to the veggies is JUST noticeable. One thing I’ll do in the future is leave the mushrooms a little larger than I did this time. They get a bit lost with the smaller dice I did here. Live and learn!

As far as re-heating goes, I guess you have a couple of options – you could fire up a water bath and use the sous vide to bring them back up to temp if you have lots of free time in your morning, or pop off the lid and stick them in the microwave. I found around 60-75 seconds does the trick, depending how screaming hot you like things. I don’t enjoy burning my mouth, so I lean towards 60. Re-heating didn’t seem to affect the taste/texture in any notable way. It’s a quick, low-carb, strangely healthy for as good as it tastes kinda breakfast!!

Anyway, here is the recipe I used – and will DEFINITELY be using again and again and again and again!

Sous Vide Cottage Cheese Egg Bites

The best way to start your morning – packed with protein and veggies and BACON!
Prep Time30 minutes
Cook Time1 hour
Heating15 minutes
Total Time1 hour 45 minutes
Course: Breakfast
Cuisine: American
Keyword: bacon, breakfast, eggs, mushrooms, onion, peppers
Servings: 8
Author: Chris Pollard

Equipment

  • 250mL wide mouth Mason jars with lids
  • Cutting board
  • Kitchen knife
  • Mixing bowl
  • Bowls to hold veggies and bacon while prepping
  • Frying pan
  • Immersion blender
  • Anova Nano Precision Cooker (or similar sous vide appliance)
  • Sous vide container

Ingredients

  • ¼ lb mushrooms coarsely chopped
  • 1 red bell pepper diced
  • 1 small onion diced
  • 1 pack bacon sliced into ½" strips
  • 1 tsp garlic minced
  • ground black pepper
  • ½ tsp kosher salt
  • 500 grams cottage cheese
  • 10 eggs large

Instructions

Prep your ingredients

  • Coarsely chop mushrooms. If you dice them up too small, they'll almost disappear in the end. These (pictured) were a bit too small, in my opinion.
  • Dice the red bell pepper.
  • Dice the onion.
  • Slice a full pack of bacon into ~½" strips.
  • Fry bacon over high heat until moisture evaporates fully. Unless you have dry cured bacon (which is awesome, btw), there is always extra liquid in bacon.
  • Reduce heat to medium-high and continue to fry until all of your bacon is brown and crispy.
  • Taste a piece or three to ensure quality. (optional)
  • Remove bacon to bowl and add all of your diced veggies to the pan. Do NOT drain the bacon fat first … unless you have some medical reason to avoid all that flavour. That's forgivable, I guess.
  • Sautee vegetables for 3 minutes over medium-high heat, adding some ground black pepper and the minced garlic about half-way through.
  • Remove veggies to a bowl, and turn off the stove so you don't set your kitchen on fire.
  • In the mixing bowl, crack all of your eggs, fishing out any bits of shell you manage to drop in there. If you need extra calcium, try a supplement instead.
  • Once the egg shells are fished out, dump in the whole container of cottage cheese.
  • Question what it is you're looking at, but tell yourself it will be worth it. (optional)
  • Add a half teaspoon of kosher salt. If your salt isn't kosher, that's kosher too. Hmmmm …
  • Break out the immersion blender and whizzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz it all together until it's a uniform smooth, creamy mix. If you don't have a stick blender, you could try a regular blender … I guess. A whisk wouldn't be great here though, because you want all the chunks of cottage cheese to become one with the egg goo.
  • Prep 8 250mL wide mouth Mason jars. That means take off the lids and make sure they're clean. Particularly important when re-using jars/lids.
  • Add a healthy pinch of bacon to each jar. Basically you're trying to divide it all up pretty evenly. But no need to measure. Just eyeball it. This isn't science, it's cooking! Be sure to leave a little bit of the bacon for later. You're going to sprinkle the tops with it like it's a fancy, meaty salt.
  • Add a couple of heaping forkfuls (unless you're using a spoon … then, spoonfuls) of the sauteed veggies to each jar.
  • Using a 1/3 cup measuring cup, add two scoops of raisins … wait, that's the cereal. Add two scoops of the egg mixture to each jar. This amount worked out EXACTLY for my 8 jars, by complete and absolute coincidence. It wasn't planned, just a Bob Ross-style happy little accident. But it works. I was shook.
  • If you have more veggies left (I did) and want more in your jars, go for it. Who am I to tell you what to do with your food? Just be sure to leave space in the top of your jars for cooking expansion.
  • Take your fork/spoon and give everything in the jars a bit of a stir. Otherwise all of your bacon will remain settled on the bottom of the jars and they'll be like that fruit at the bottom yogurt stuff. Nobody wants that. Although I'd rather have bacon at the bottom, if I had to choose.
  • Take those last little bacon crumbs you saved (you DID save some, right?) and add a few to the top of each jar.
  • Add the lids to your jars, just finger tight. Don't crank them on too tightly. You want expanding gasses to be able to escape while they're in the water bath. It's just like canning that way … in fact, the jars should seal JUST like when you're canning.
  • Add your jars to the sous vide container.
  • Fill container with hot water.
  • Set your sous vide appliance to 178° and the timer to 1 hour. I used the Anova app with my Nano. Super easy, and I could keep an eye on things from my phone on the other side of the house while doing other things.
  • Put the lid on your container (or don't … if you need the humidity inside) and … wait.
  • When the hour (at temp) is up, grab some tongs and pull your jars out to dry off and cool down.
  • Crack one open to … "ensure product quality."

Notes

I started out using the 50/50 egg/cheese recommendation from the Sous Vide Everything Starbucks Egg Bites video. I looked at their cook time/temperature, along with some similar recipes in the Anova app and split the 172 degrees from most of the app recipes with the 185 degrees Guga used and came up with one hour at 178 degrees.  It seems to have worked very well.  I may try 175 in the future to see if there is any difference.
Feel free to substitute in any of your favourite flavours!

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