Poached Egg

I saw the YouTube short from Chef John about poaching eggs.

I’ve never poached an egg. I have double-boiled/steamed an egg in one of those pans for poaching eggs, but I’ve never done it in just boiling water. I learned two things.

The obvious-after-the-fact one is that if you create a vortex in the water before putting the egg in, it stays together in the center. “Creating a vortex” is probably better known as “stirring”.

The one I had never heard of is “watery store-bought eggs”. Say what? Store-bought eggs are watery? Since when? The solution is obvious if one knows that there is a problem: Crack the egg into a sieve and let the water drain out, then proceed as usual.

The latter is what prompted this experiment. I wasn’t particularly hungry for eggs, but I got two for what would be “lupper”, I suppose. I did one each way starting from a clean pan, on high to start boiling, turned down to be barely bubbling, vortexing the water, then sliding the egg in from a custard cup and boiling for three minutes.

	Regular Egg	Strained Egg
Mess	not egg-drop soup, but lots of white billowing around in the water	much less white floating around, but still some
Size	nominal	significantly smaller
Texture	rubbery	not rubbery

Chef John said that one could poach two or three eggs at the same time. With regular eggs, I don’t think that would work well. The white billows in the boiling water and I think they would attach to one another (like cookies too close together when baking). With strained eggs, I think it would be fine; it was much more compact and what white did separate drifted away unattached.