Poached Eggs

When my husband arrived in my life, I was surprised to find how much he loved poached eggs. We would go out for breakfast and he’d order Eggs Benedict with beautiful poached eggs enveloped in delicious hollandaise sauce.

At the time I was travelling a lot with work. One morning I found myself dining in a hotel that had the chef standing in the dining room at a table ready to cook eggs for me on the spot, exactly how I liked them. I noticed he had a pot of water gently simmering over a hot plate – clearly for poaching eggs. I asked him if he could show me how it’s done.

The chef told me the first and most important tip was to have very fresh eggs. He said eggs more than three days old just weren’t good enough for the job. Second, he said you needed to add a goodly amount of vinegar to the water. And finally, he said you needed to simmer the water just so. No rolling boil!

I went home a tried to cook poached eggs for my husband. The farm fresh eggs were not available at my supermarket – lets face it, we just don’t know how old the eggs we buy from the supermarket are. The vinegar part was no problem. Getting the water to simmer wasn’t too hard either. At the time I was using an electric stove, and I was very used to its personality quirks. I couldn’t, however, produce that beautiful teardrop shaped egg the chef produced without swirling the water. No big deal! It’s the end result that matters, right?

Ingredients
1 deep pot
2 tblsp white vinegar
1 very fresh egg
1 slotted spoon
1 digital timer (use your iPhone if you have one)

1. Pour the vinegar into the pot. Fill with water until it is about one inch from the top of the pot. Bring to a gentle simmer. This means the water steams and you can see lots of little bubbles on the bottom of the pot. But there are no big rolling bubbles.
2. Swirl the water quickly in a clockwise direction until you have a little bit of a whirlpool going.
3. Crack the egg on the side of the pot and carefully drop it into the swirling water. Put the egg shell in the bin, rinse any egg off your fingers and dry your hands. THEN start the timer.
4. Gently push the water with the slotted spoon to keep it circling, making sure your egg does not attach to the bottom. At this point it should be nicely formed and starting to float.
5. Continue to poach for three and a half minutes. Gently scoop the egg out of the water with the slotted spoon. Drain as much water as you can and carefully transfer it to a saucer. Hold the egg carefully and drain and excess water back into the pot. Let the egg sit for one minute, then serve!

I’ve given you lots of little tips here, as these are all my secrets to making poached eggs work. I really hope, if you haven’t been able to master this breakfast delight, that all my advice works. Happy eating!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Marshmallow Sherbet Cones

Image
I have always been a big fan of sherbet in the many forms it comes in. As a kid, I loved those sherbet cones you bought from the corner store – semi solidified sherbet in a stale cone, with chewy marshmallow on the top, coated in hundreds and thousands. I also loved Wiz Fizz – fruity sherbet in a glassine bag with a little plastic shovel. I’d most often buy these on the way home from the pool, because they were only five cents. Unfortunately, my hands were usually still wet from the pool, turning the bag to a sloppy mess before I could eat its entire contents. For my 10th birthday my mum decided to include homemade sherbet cones on the menu. Thanks to The Australian Women’s Weekly recipe cards, we had the recipe for sherbet and marshmallow, albeit, on different cards. My clever mum bought flat bottomed square cones, half filled them with sherbet and then topped them with pink or green marshmallow. Of course each had a liberal sprinkling of hundreds and thousands. In my explo...
Read more

White Chocolate Ganache

Image
I don’t think there is an occasion more joyous than a wedding. Of course, once a wedding has taken place, many more joys follow, like the arrival of a long awaited baby. But it all starts with a wedding, and I find weddings to be chock-filled with hope. If you’re lucky, you only ever need to have one wedding – although some people have more than one, if not several! So the trick to getting your fill of wedding joy is to know lots of people who are planning on getting married. As a cake baker, I am getting to participate in weddings, baby showers, naming days and even funerals (although not too many of those, thank goodness)! I consider it a privilege to be invited to create cakes and cupcakes for these landmark occasions in people’s lives. We (my darling husband and I) always try extra hard to come up with something special that fits the occasion and the people who we’re baking for. And what we’ve discovered is trying extra hard allows us an opportunity for continuous improvement. When...
Read more

Road Test: Sunbeam Mixmaster v Kenwood Patissier

Image
Back in 2003 when I began my most recent baking odyssey, I acquired a Sunbeam Mixmaster – the remake of the classic retro mixer from the fifties. My mother had a Mixmaster which she bought in the seventies, and which I did most of my cake baking with as a teenager (when the obsession truly took hold). She still has that Mixmaster today, although it is significantly worse for wear – the plastic cover over the light is broken and they haven’t made the bulbs for years, so there’s a “live” cavity where the light bulb should be. I can vouch for that because I stuck my finger in there accidentally last year and got a nice shock from it. I paid quite a lot of money for my Mixmaster and it held pride of place on my kitchen bench for three years. That is until I had it running one Sunday and one of the motors blew up! I discovered that the twin motor “600 watt” power it claimed worked in two ways: 1. to run the beaters; 2. to turn the turntable the bowl sits on. After seeing flames shooting fro...
Read more