Tony Finch – blog

A few weeks ago I was enjoying a couple of boiled eggs

(in the shell, with plenty of salt and pepper, and buttery fingers of toast to dunk into the runny yolk)

and pondering how fiddly it is to cut off one end of the shell after boiling compared to eating a poached egg. And I was annoyed because (I thought) I didn’t know how to poach eggs.

misconceptions

For decades I have been under the impression that poached eggs are difficult, because cheffy bods on the telly make such a fuss over cooking them. They led me to believe two falsehoods, both of which have a grain of truth, but it turns out they are not the overwhelming obstacles I thought.

I decided to see what happens if I just don’t do any of the chef tricks. How bad could it be? If the poached eggs turned out to be a disaster, I would at least have confirmed what I believed. If not, I have added some delicious food to my repertoire.

What did I believe? And what did I learn…

• If you just break an egg into boiling water, it’ll dissolve into a soupy mess? Yes the egg will spread out and the water will get messy, but almost all of the egg will hold together neatly by itself.

• If you don’t do the cheffy faff, your poached eggs will be inedible? In fact the fuss is mostly about levelling up from basic to restaurant-standard presentation. A no-fuss but frilly egg is still nice to eat.

basic tricks

The key trick for boiling an egg is to have plenty of boiling water in the pan before adding the eggs. That gives you a stable temperature and therefore predictable cooking times.

To boil large hen eggs from room temperature, I aim for about 4 minutes for a runny yolk, or 8 minutes for a slightly fudgy hard-boiled yolk.

For poached eggs, the water should be at a gentle simmer to avoid agitating the wispy white more than necessary. I add plenty of salt for seasoning. A cooking time of 3 minutes is about right.

The key trick for poaching eggs is not to worry about the wispy whites in the water. It might be messy but it’ll be fine.

Break the eggs near the surface of the water so they aren’t agitated too much from plunging in. When the surface of the white has started coagulating, give them a nudge to make sure they are moving enough to cook evenly and aren’t stuck to the bottom of the pan.

Unlike a boiled egg, I can lift the poached egg out of the water with a slotted spoon and jiggle it to judge when it is ready, which is better than relying on my oven timer that can only be set in increments of a whole minute, and handy when I forget to set it…

cheffy faff

There are about half a dozen ways to improve the presentation of poached eggs.

• Use very fresh eggs, because they hold their shape better with less wispy white. I only have supermarket eggs, so egg age is not something I can control.

• Use a fine mesh strainer to separate the loose wispy white from the firm inner white.

  I think watching this trick taught me that raw eggs are a lot more cohesive and robust than I thought, and they don’t just dissolve into water.

• Get the water spinning like a vortex before adding the egg.

  Helen Rennie has a video on poaching eggs in which she discusses why this method is better in a restaurant (after about 6m10s). It requires a very large pot so it isn’t ideal for cooking a few portions at home.

• Break the egg into a small dish or ladle, so it can be introduced to the water more gently. This is worth doing but nevertheless I don’t bother :-)

• Add a little vinegar to the water. I don’t believe this has any effect on how the whites spread.

  It’s possible to use vinegar to coagulate the whites before poaching, but this requires a lot of vinegar and takes a long time, and harms the flavour of the eggs. Most of the spreading of a poached egg is due to turbulence when it plunges into the water, and it happens far too fast to be affected by a little vinegar.

• Wrap the egg in cling film. I don’t care enough about how neat my eggs are to fiddle with throwaway plastic and risk spilling egg in a clumsy mess.

  We have some reusable silicone things that cook eggs in a style somewhere between poached and coddled. We almost never use them because they are fiddly and tend to undercook the tops of the eggs even with a lid to keep the steam in.

• Trim the egg with a knife after cooking. Almost as wasteful as the strainer method!

Or… don’t!

thoughts

In retrospect it’s curious that I was discouraged from even trying to poach eggs for such a long time, and that it took so little to discourage me.

I suppose it illustrates how offputting extra steps can be to a beginner. It wasn’t clear to me which steps were optional and what were the consequences of omitting them.

It’s something to keep in mind when writing documentation, I guess :-)