By Donna Price

dprice@americanpress.com

Story, photos by Donna Price

dprice@americanpress.com

I’ll admit I was lagging behind in my knowledge of Starbucks breakfast menu items. Until recently I had never heard of the coffee giant’s sous vide egg bites.

It has been a few weeks now since I first learned that these poached eggs with the fancy French name are a thing. Education reporter Marlisa Harding and I were at a school interviewing Kindergarten students the day I found out. While we waited for the students to arrive in the office where we were set up, Marlisa started talking about Starbucks’ egg bites and how she planned to stop and get some after our assignment.

That’s when an office worker in an adjoining room chimed in, agreeing that the Starbucks egg bites are indeed awesome. Then together she and Marlisa began singing the praises of these egg bites, with words like fluffy, light, creamy and velvety being thrown around quite freely.

I wondered what I had been missing out on. Later, I did a little research.

I learned there are three kinds of Starbucks egg bites: 1. the ham, cheddar and peppers, 2. the egg white and red pepper and 3. the bacon and Gruyère cheese.

Sous vide is pronounced “sue-veed” and is French for “under vacuum.” Sous vide, it turns out, is a cooking technique in which food, like an egg, is placed in a vacuumed-sealed plastic bag and cooked slowly in water at a precise temperature.

To cook anything sous vide, one needs an immersion circulator — an electrical device that is inserted into a tub or pot of water. It draws water from the tub, heats it to a precise temperature, then spits it back out, heating and circulating the water at the same time. A good immersion circulator can give a chef single-degree precision and accuracy, according to seriouseats.com.

Why bother? This method of cooking offers consistent results, which a busy coffee house chain trying to churn out cooked eggs would find attractive.

When I visited the Starbucks location at 4055 Ryan St. Tuesday, I decided I would try the Bacon & Gruyère egg bites.

I know I had the pronunciation of sous vide down but since I didn’t want to stumble on the pronunciation of Gruyère, which is supposedly gree-yer, I simply asked for “the bacon egg bites” when I ordered. It worked. In no time at all I was handed two incredibly cute circular egg formations that looked like small biscuits with cheese and bacon on top accompanied by a wonderful cup of Starbucks Christmas Blend dark roast coffee, which I also ordered.

The two bacon & Gruyère sous vide egg bites contain 300 calories and cost $4.45.

And the taste? It turns out that fluffy, light, creamy and velvety are excellent adjectives to describe them. The egg bites are all those things. And they taste great with Starbucks coffee.

Of course, I later learned I had chosen the most calorie-dense egg bites in the Starbucks lineup. The egg white and red pepper version weighs in at a mere 170 calories. I’ll try those on my next visit.