Perfecting poached eggs

I love poached eggs. A poached egg on toast is such a simple but elegant meal. Watching the runny yolk spread across the toast is a beautiful thing to watch surpassed on by how amazing it tastes. Perfecting your poached eggs, like so many other kitchen skills, is not difficult, and with a few quick tips, you might find your poached eggs go from good to great.

This is Technical Tuesday, so here is a little technical information for you. Egg whites are primarily a protein called albumen, and acids cause proteins to coagulate. With this in mind, we can simply increase the acidity of our poaching liquid to give our eggs a little help in firming up by adding some vinegar to our water. There doesn’t need to be a lot of vinegar, about a 5ml (1tsp) for each litre of water that you are using. This will increase the acidity without it impacting the flavour of the egg. And of course, don’t forget to add salt to you water, about a tsp of that as well.

The other tip I will offer is about the water temperature. We want to poach our eggs, not boil them. You want to bring your water to a simmer, and then reduce the temperature of the stove. We should see a few bubbles coming from the bottom of the pot, but if the water is too hot, and there is too much action in the water, the eggs will not have the chance to properly coagulate and will end up falling apart.

Make sure to start your toast ahead of dropping your eggs in the water. In this video I poached the eggs for 4 minutes to get perfectly firm egg whites while having a nice runny egg yolk.