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My friends, I have reached an exciting cooking milestone: I've learned how to poach eggs! Admittedly this has probably been in my reach for years and I've just never tried it because I always figured that the eggs would explode upon contact with water (don't the eggs come apart in Julie & Julia?), BUT IN FACT I have made five batches of poached eggs and not a single egg has exploded.
The secret seems to be leaving them well alone. Dump them in the simmering water and just leave them there for four minutes (if you want delicious runny yolks but fully cooked whites) and don't even try to "gather stray bits of egg white back with a spoon" or whatever it is they tell you to do in cookbooks. Meddling will only upset the eggs! Let them be and they will gather themselves into delicious compact packages of eggy goodness without your help. Use the time to grate a little parmesan instead.
I haven't actually put parmesan on my poached eggs, but Tamar Adler recommends it in An Everlasting Meal and it sounds delicious. And it would be a better use of my time than staring at the eggs as they poach, as if I could mesmerize them into poaching faster even though at four minutes they are basically instantaneous already.
Another recipe suggestion from An Everlasting Meal (which I super recommend, by the way, it's the book that gave me the courage to poach in the first place): sliced citrus fruits with salt & a dusting of chili flakes. I haven't tried that one yet either, but it sounds - intriguing. Chili flakes were one of my big culinary discoveries of 2017: I was a very picky eater as a child and am therefore forever discovering things that everyone else has been eating for years. One day I might even discover coffee.
My 2018 discovery: black pepper. It is delicious on soup and also on top of poached eggs.
***
One less appetizing discovery: if you cook pasta and then you leave it in your fridge for *mumblecough* a while, it will go sour. Fermentation, maybe? At any rate it totally ruined my beautiful pasta bake that I was going to have for lunch the other day. :( So I poached a pair of eggs instead.
The secret seems to be leaving them well alone. Dump them in the simmering water and just leave them there for four minutes (if you want delicious runny yolks but fully cooked whites) and don't even try to "gather stray bits of egg white back with a spoon" or whatever it is they tell you to do in cookbooks. Meddling will only upset the eggs! Let them be and they will gather themselves into delicious compact packages of eggy goodness without your help. Use the time to grate a little parmesan instead.
I haven't actually put parmesan on my poached eggs, but Tamar Adler recommends it in An Everlasting Meal and it sounds delicious. And it would be a better use of my time than staring at the eggs as they poach, as if I could mesmerize them into poaching faster even though at four minutes they are basically instantaneous already.
Another recipe suggestion from An Everlasting Meal (which I super recommend, by the way, it's the book that gave me the courage to poach in the first place): sliced citrus fruits with salt & a dusting of chili flakes. I haven't tried that one yet either, but it sounds - intriguing. Chili flakes were one of my big culinary discoveries of 2017: I was a very picky eater as a child and am therefore forever discovering things that everyone else has been eating for years. One day I might even discover coffee.
My 2018 discovery: black pepper. It is delicious on soup and also on top of poached eggs.
***
One less appetizing discovery: if you cook pasta and then you leave it in your fridge for *mumblecough* a while, it will go sour. Fermentation, maybe? At any rate it totally ruined my beautiful pasta bake that I was going to have for lunch the other day. :( So I poached a pair of eggs instead.
