Seriously, who even knows what a perfectly poached egg is, unless you have been served one or know its description. Most of us, okay I, would think the stringy, craggy edges of egg white and a completely off-centered yolk are perfectly acceptable, if that is all we see most often. Not all restaurants serve perfect poached eggs, either. I have in the past been served some with completely runny as well as completely cooked yolks, instead of dreamy soft with a runny center. Suspicious ones exist too. A popular restaurant in the Cuba quarter of Wellington, New Zealand, used to serve poached eggs that were always round but strangely with barely a thin film of white enclosing the yolk. Could that be called a perfect poached egg, when a big part of the egg is missing? Egg white constitutes a whopping 65% of an egg, not counting the shell.* Pretty ingenious shortcut - probably just a little stringy bit to trim off, if any, and the rest can go in a pavlova. Of course, I'm only guessing.
Poached egg to me was like a 300-level skill at least, definitely not 101. But, I still prefer the authentic skill to shortcuts.
There are a lot of articles on the Web making an attempt to help us make the perfect poached egg. Most help at least in some way, but this one by Kristen Aiken from The Huffington Post is the best - concise yet thorough in explaining the causes of problems. Following her instructions, I succeeded making the perfect poached egg the first time and consistently thereafter.
My main takeaways from the instructions:
* do not add salt to the water
* vinegar is unnecessary if you do it right
* stir the water to create a whirlpool before sliding the egg in the center of the whirlpool
Do visit Kristen's article for a proper read of her instructions.
The only thing missing in her instructions (and from other people's) is how to determine if an egg is fresh without breaking it first.
Boiled egg is eggs 101, right?
Tip:
How to tell if an egg is fresh without breaking it open?
Eggs come in batches, and if you buy them from supermarkets, they should have a best-before date on the carton or whichever packaging they come in. So, the closer the time is to that date, the older they are. However, from my experience, even the supposed same batch in the same carton often contain mixed degrees of freshness. The trick is to put the egg in a large bowl of water, and use it only if it is lying down on the bottom, NOT floating upright and definitely NOT floating at the top of the water. Apparently, according to Eggcyclopedia a freshly laid egg does not have an air cell - the pocket of air, or space, under the shell that we can see when we peel an egg. The air cell is developed and becomes larger as the egg ages.
* yolk to white proportion information obtained from a study published by Iowa State University: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/d8a4/986905f5dd90f62495f6f07b6740a549dd2f.pdf
#eggs #poachedegg