Poaching

[osprey_archer]

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.

Comments

[kore]

Do you just dump them in the boiling water without a slotted spoon or anything? Do you use a pot or skillet? A lot of water? I do try to kind of gather back the slowly drifting egg whites because otherwise they kind of look like tentacles and it's gross.

I tried the "poach an egg for a minute in one cup of water in the microwave" cheat and wound up with either raw eggs or eggs that exploded. sigh.

[osprey_archer]

I am suspicious of all egg + microwave combinations. It just seems so likely to go disastrously wrong, and eggs cook so fast on the stovetop anyway that there's almost no point (unless the microwave is the only cooking device one has access to, I guess, but even in that case it might just be better to give up on eggs for the duration).

I break the eggs into little cups with sharp rims (the book recommended teacups, but I can't quite bring myself to use my teacups for it), then slip them right into a small pot of simmering water filled up fairly high. (I add a little vinegar to help the whites stay together.) I think the pot is quart-size. It's big enough for two eggs but I wouldn't do any more than that in there.

The eggs tentacle out a bit at first, but they seem to neaten up of their own accord as they cook.

[kore]

OHO, thank you!

I think I was using too many eggs and too little water. At too low a temperature. Hmmm.

[thisbluespirit]

My friends, I have reached an exciting cooking milestone: I've learned how to poach eggs!

Well done! I have a 70s poacher that is the cheating not-proper way to do it, but, frankly, I think tastes much nicer. But horrified colleagues told me I should poach them properly and how easy it was, and all I ended up with was watery blobs of egg. And then someone else said if you put vinegar in the water it held them together better, and so next I wound up with watery eggs that tastes of vinegar, so now I just use my uncool 70s poacher without shame.

(BUt it did work, yes, although it sounds as if you've got more of the knack of it there! \o/)

[osprey_archer]

Is this one of those little cups that you lower into the boiling water so it keeps the egg contained as it poaches? Those look so cool and if I was trying to poach eggs for eggs benedicts for company or something else where they ought to look neat then I would definitely try to buy one.

[thisbluespirit]

Yes, or I think so - like this:



(Except mine is very very battered and from the 1970s, so downgrade mentally from this.)

The water version is better in many ways - it's the proper way and the poaching cups need a little marg or oil to prevent sticking (well, ancient 70s ones do; newer ones may not) - but I do really like them this way! (It was because of the marg that I got persuaded into trying to poach them with no cups, because I once accidentally made them using garlic butter and couldn't understand how the eggs came to taste of garlic. It was a great mystery. And then my colleague was equally baffled as to what marg had to say to poached eggs. Confusion all round!)

[kore]

My parents had what is probably the same kind of model egg poacher from the seventies. But they had actually lived through the 30s and 40s and so had the postwar generation's enthusiasm for gadgets and microwaves and frozen dinners and margarine and cake mix and all the other "no labour" things.

[kore]

In fact I thiiink the one my parents had looked a lot like this -- must've been Revere cookware (most of their stuff was Revere or Corningware blue)



Stainless steel with a heavy copper bottom apparently. Vintage instructions:

https://www.reverewareparts.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/egg_poacher.pdf

"Insert fork in lock-on cup handle and slide eggs onto buttered toast and serve," I didn't know you used a fork!

[missroserose]

Ooo, congrats! Poached eggs are a little fussy to learn but well worth the effort, especially with black pepper! Yum.

My favorite trick which (much like poaching) takes a few tries but works surprisingly well: use a spoon to swirl the water around into a little whirlpool, then drop the egg(s) into the center of the whirlpool. If you do it right, the swirls help to keep the white mostly contained around the yolk; if you do it just right, the whites wrap all around the yolk in a perfect little eggy package (which only happens maybe one in every ten eggs I do but is SO SATISFYING when it does). Also, older eggs are better because they're more acidic and the whites stick together better, but if you only have fresh eggs, adding some white vinegar to the water will help with the same effect.

(augh, sorry for the multiple edits. I went to a late showing of Black Panther last night and I haven't yet had my second cup of coffee.)

[osprey_archer]

I've added vinegar to the water every time so far. At some point I should probably try it without, but it's been working so well and why mess with success, you know?

Oh, but I did poach an egg in lentil soup once (this is also something Adler suggested in her book - poaching an egg in soup, at least; she may not have had lentil soup in mind). I didn't add any vinegar that time, but I suspect that the lentils impede the egg's impulse to spread: there's just not a lot of space for it.

[kore]

Hunh, I hadn't thought of it as poaching the eggs, but I do make "souls in purgatory" which is basically "cook tomato-heavy base, make depressions in it, drop in eggs, wait til cooked."

[missroserose]

Yeah, I can never remember how old my eggs are so I just add vinegar too, haha.

I've never thought of poaching an egg in soup - that sounds like a lovely idea! I'll have to experiment next time I'm making one.