Learn to Cook: How to Poach an Egg

in the Test Kitchen we think that poaching eggs is a valuable technique to have in your cooking arsenal while this egg can be served on its own it's also a great way to turn a simple sign think of corned beef hash or a salad into a substantial meal the poaching eggs can be an exercise in patience and perseverance when properly poached the yolks should flow out when broken into while the whites are set and neatly encapsulate the yolk and they're not all frayed and shaggy as they often are and with some care you'll see that making poached eggs is mostly a hands-off affair so let me demonstrate now we're going to make a takes all at once so we'll need a large skillet and this one is perfect since it's 12 inches and it also has a lid and this lid will become important later on so at this point we go ahead and fill the skillet almost all the way up to the rim with water good to go now already this recipe looks quite different from most poached egg recipes which call for a saucepan the deep high sides of the saucepan make it awfully difficult to carefully place the eggs in the pan and Plus you can only poach one or two eggs at a time so next up we want to add a little bit of vinegar into the water and this is two tablespoons of just plain old white vinegar and it won't really flavor the water at all so don't worry about sour eggs but it will help the proteins and the whites set more quickly giving them less of a chance to fray in the water at this point we'll also go ahead and add a teaspoon of salt that's just going to help season our eggs help with flavor and we'll bring all of this up to the boil over high heat so there we go and in the meantime we can get the eggs ready now again I said that we're cooking eight eggs we're using the large eggs and anyone whose poached eggs knows what a pain it is to crack each egg into the water at one at a time at that point you pray that they don't break open but it's much too late by then if they do and they cook unevenly that's because the first one end has a minute or two head start from the last one so in a dish where seconds make the difference between cream yolks or hard cook centers this is a huge deal so we're going to make it easier on ourselves we crack two eggs each into four teacups that way we can hold two cups in each hand and add all the eggs in one shot you'll see in just a second so it just have to finish with these two eggs crack them right into the cup and if they break I can just throw it away and start over there we go so just have to wait for the water to come to the boil okay we can see that the water is boiling so it's time to add the eggs but first off we want to slide this pan off heat turn off the burner as well this way the water will calm down just enough to not cause the edges of the egg whites to fray so we'll grab these four cups and quickly we just lower the rims of the cups so that they're in the water and that way the eggs flow out perfect so let's get that lid on cover the pan now we're going to poach these eggs right here we're not going to return the pan to the burner the sub boiling water will cook the eggs gently the eggs will stay in one place instead of bobbing around in the boiling water so for these eight eggs that will take about five minutes now for fewer eggs if you were a table for Tuesday you would still need five minutes but for more eggs like a dozen the time would be up to about seven minutes all right our time is up so it's time to lift up the lid and we can see our neat little bundles of poached eggs in there and they are done so just take a slotted spoon I'll carefully transfer each one to paper towel-lined plate that paper towel we'll saw up any excess water all right last one there we go so lastly we just season the eggs with little salt and pepper and you can transfer one to our plate now these eggs are ready to be used and eaten on their own or you can always use them in eggs benedict with a little hollandaise sauce but you can see that creamy yolk and that is a beautifully poached egg enjoy

Channel: America's Test Kitchen

Views: 2,098,601

Keywords: eggs, cooking, poaching, poach, breakfast, tip, howto, poached, egg, benedict

Id: xpN1dlH3tWo

Length: 4min 31sec (271 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 05 2013