Poached Eggs

Poached eggs can be a pain. There’s nothing fun about hunching over a giant pot of boiling water or delicately sliding raw eggs into the pot, hoping they won’t fall apart. It’s bad enough doing one or two for a quiet breakfast at home: only a masochist would do it for a larger group of people, especially without being paid.

Understanding why poached eggs can be such a chore requires a shallow dive into biochemistry. The challenge with eggs is messing with all the proteins without anything going wrong. For our purposes it’s useful to think of a protein as a sort of long piece of string that’s all tangled up for a specific biological purpose. When we cook the egg we’re using heat to untangle the protein, and then, with more heat, tangle the proteins back up in a new and more appetizing way.

For eggs, this untangling or “denaturing” process begins to happen around 60 °C (140 °F). The process of re-tangling (“coagulation”) will happen throughout the egg by the time we hit about 80 °C (176 °F). The key point: both these temperatures are well below the boiling point of water, 100 °C. It’s very easy to overshoot if the temperature of your cooking medium is well above your target. When you try to poach an egg in very hot water, it’s like trying to take a photo of a champion sprinter at peak speed. It’s possible, but it’s a lot harder than taking a photo of a sloth.

In the last five or ten years immersion circulators (“sous vide”) have become a lot more accessible. With an immersion circulator, we can heat the cooking medium to the temperature we want rather than one that’s easy to maintain with simpler equipment. This makes making poached eggs a breeze.

Special equipment

• Immersion circulator

Ingredients

• Eggs, in the shell

Method

Following the instructions for your circulator, bring a bath of water to the desired temperature according to the table below. When the bath is at temperature, gently lower the eggs into the water. Let them poach for the time listed in the table below.

Once the eggs are cooked, crack them open onto a kitchen towel to wick away excess water, then serve.