The most foolproof way to enjoy perfectly poached eggs is to order them out at your favourite café – right?
It’s certainly the easy approach when one considers all the questions surrounding the poaching process: do you need to create a whirlpool? Vinegar or no vinegar? And what about all those nifty egg poachers you can buy these days – are they worth the money? And there's one other revolutionary idea you might not have heard of .... but more on that in a minute.
First up, the vinegar question.
In a bold move, in favour of salt before straining his eggs (we’re not surprised – after all, this is the man who’s turned bacon into ice-cream) but stresses the importance of using the freshest you can find. Kenji López-Alt at the Food Lab – where pretty much everything gets put to the test – is another who says straining and fresh eggs are key (watch Kenji show how he does it ).
get Heston's recipe
Heston Blumenthal's poached eggs
Chef Tom Kerridge, host of shows including , agrees that freshness is key to perfectly poached eggs, but unlike Heston, believes vinegar also helps.
“You don’t want a lot of vinegar – not enough to taste – but just enough for a chemical reaction,” Kerridge stresses, when SBS Food chats to him about perfect poaching. “A little bit of acid helps set the whites.”
The vinegar should be colourless (a distilled or white wine vinegar will work) and not a balsamic or aged malt variety that will turn the eggs brown.
As for how to overcome the very real risk of a decomposed, soggy egg, the English TV chef and gastro-pub king has a handy little trick that he believes is a game-changer. Which brings us to our first tip: step away from the gimmicky store-bought poaching tools.
Instead, try Tom's clever hack.
“What you do is you put your egg (while still in the shell) into a pot of boiling water and you roll it around for about ten seconds,” Kerridge instructs. “Then you remove it from the water.”
Once you’ve taken the egg out of the pot, add a splash of vinegar into the water and gently simmer it, stirring with a spoon.
“Do a whirlpool – but not one that’s spinning so fast it could sink a ship – just a nice gentle one that’s almost the speed of a second hand going around the clock,” Kerridge says.
Then, crack the egg back into the pot and simmer for about two minutes before draining it on a tea towel.
“What you’ve done just by that little process in the beginning is help the egg hold it shape."
Source: Brett Stevens
Melbourne breakfast institution Rudimentary poaches around 700 eggs a week at their Footscray shipping container-turned café. Head chef Francisco Arbelo and sous chef Mark Ward crack fresh free-range eggs into water that has been brought to a rolling boil in a deep pot with plenty of vinegar (approximately 250ml of vinegar to five litres of water).
“There’s no need to stir,” the chefs agree, “just cook them for two minutes.”
According to Arbelo and Ward, the eggs are ready when the whites hold their shape but are still runny in the centre (wobbly but not too soft when poked).
Finish by removing the egg gently with a perforated spoon and draining it on a tea towel.
“If the egg flattens when being lifted out, it will need to be cooked for slightly longer,” the chefs explain.
At the French-leaning Bistro Gavroche in Sydney’s Chippendale, poached eggs aren’t just the order of the day at sunrise.
“One of my favourite dishes is a classic called Oeuf meurette and guests always ask for it,” says executive chef and owner Frederic Colin. The Burgundy dish involves poaching the eggs in a red wine and serving it with a meurette sauce (wine sauce) with bacon and pearl onions.
At Sydney’s Bistro Gavroche, Oeuf meurette is a popular all-day dish. Eggs are poached in red wine and served with a wine sauce, bacon and onions. Source: Bistro Gavroche
“They’re fine straight from the fridge, as long as they’re fresh,” Kerridge agrees.
