Thanis Lim

All Rounder Chef and Food Journalist

Slow Poached Eggs

The famous Julia Child’s cookbook taught many the French ways to poach your eggs. Poaching your first perfect poached egg can be a wonderful experience. When you try to fry an egg, the whites will cook a lot faster than the yolks and you won’t get an even texture. If you poach an egg, both the whites and yolks, will be almost similar in texture, just between solid and liquid and as you dip your fork or spoon onto the yolk, it oozes out like liquid gold. Hmm…. Simply irresistible

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Oh would you look at those yolks!

However, many tend to find that poaching the perfect egg takes lots of practice and can be problematic to master. Imagine if you’re hosting a dinner party for your friends and you need poached eggs as part of your menu or ingredients, you’ll find it quite troublesome to cook so many poached eggs, one by one.

I have here – the secret to easy perfect poached eggs. Yes – Easy – and you can even poach 10-20 eggs all at once depending on the size of your biggest pot! This is very convenient for restaurants who want needs to make 50-100 eggs for their customers. Usually in restaurants, they will have an expensive immersion circulator, which allows them to maintain the temperature of the water constantly.

Fortunately, you will not need to buy one of those. I’ll teach you how to do this at home. You will just need an instant read thermometer and lots of patience to execute this! The secret is slow poaching your eggs! Can you imagine, an egg, that when you crack it open, will out pop a perfect poached egg onto your plate!

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Beautiful slow poached eggs fresh out of the shell – serve with mustard, sausages, baked beans and greens~ hmmm…..

Famous celebrity chefs such as Wylie Dufresne and David Chang are two such chefs who love using this method to poach their eggs. What you can do is simple. It has the same concept as letting your eggs have a bath in a hot-spring for 40 – 45 minutes, depending on the size of your eggs.

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Beautiful fresh out of the shell slow poached eggs goes well with miso butter and garlic fried long beans

First, fill up your biggest pot with water, then put a rack at the bottom of the pot. This is to make sure the eggs don’t reach the bottom of the pan, where it’s too hot.

Heat up the water until only 145 degrees Fahrenheit or 65 degrees Celsius, give or take a few degrees difference. When you drop the eggs down, they will drop a few degrees – the ideal temperature is 143 degrees Fahrenheit for me.

Now add the eggs slowly into the pot, dropping them slowly with a strainer so that you don’t crack the egg before they can even poach. Sometimes, supermarkets might have eggs with very fragile shells, and this can be problematic.

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You can pop in as many eggs as you like depending on the size of your pot. Make a lot at one time and keep them in the fridge for up to a week.

Now comes the hard part. That is to maintain the temperature constant for 40-45 minutes! What I did was to set the heat to very low and as the thermometer reads higher than 145 degrees Fahrenheit, I immediately kill the heat and add tap water to it to lower the temperature and if it drops below 135, I will turn up the heat till it reaches 143, and then set it to low heat till it hits 145 again, then kill the heat. Tedious process, but I assure you it is worth it!

After 45 minutes, take out one egg and crack it on a bowl, if the whites are still too runny, give it another 2-3 minutes. At this stage, if you’re going to keep the eggs for another day or so, I would pop them all into ice cold water, and then keep them in the fridge for up to 3 days. When you’re about to serve them, just soak them in warm water (about 140 degrees Fahrenheit) for 3-5 minutes.

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If you have an immersion circulator like me – just set your timer to 143 degrees Fahrenheit for 50 minutes. It makes the job a lot easier.

Usually, I would arrange the eggs nicely on a basket or beautiful bowl. When the guests arrive, I would crack one egg in front of them and watch their amazement as out pops a beautifully poached egg from the shell. I assure you, this really impresses your guests!

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I cracked one of these beauties onto stir fried chive stalks with Chinese Fermented Tofu – beautiful presentation and guests love to see the custardy yolks flowing out and mixing with the vegetables!

To serve, you could eat them with soy sauce the traditional Chinese way or you can pop one of them into your soup noodles! You can also serve them with grilled asparagus or other grilled vegetables, or simply any recipe that calls for a poached egg! What are you waiting for? Try slow poaching your eggs now!

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Even your instant noodles can be transformed by cracking one or two sous vide eggs to it to serve.

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