The War On Cookbooks

50 Ways To Poach an Egg

For something as seemingly simple as cooking a raw egg in hot water, it never ceases to amaze me that so many people disagree on how best to do it.  The other week when I was working at a French restaurant I was tasked with poaching a batch of eggs to be deep-fried later on that day. When I began setting up three different chefs told me three different and seemingly contradictory methods for egg poaching. I became so intrigued by this that I tried all three and gave them marks out of ten. Interestingly all three methods worked ok, but none of them achieved a flawless result every time. I was also told a story by one of the chefs about a time he worked in a kitchen in France and was ridiculed for putting salt in the water. All the chefs at the restaurant claimed that “the worst possible thing you could do when poaching eggs was to salt the water “but none of them seemed to have a concrete reason as to why “ You just don’t, simple as that” would seem to be the reasoning.  So this English chef challenged them to cook 10 eggs there way and he would cook 10 his way. In conclusion they found that both eggs looked almost identical but both parties noted that the ones cooked in salt tasted a little bit better.

It’s made me think a lot about egg poaching since. So I decided to do a bit of research in to how many ways it can be done and how many of those ways are actually any good.  I got to a point in my research where I now think I could easily do 50 different methods so I decided to stick the goalposts there.

Before I start though we need to look at how and why an egg poaches and see what it is we are trying to achieve in each method.

The Science bit.

When we poach an egg we are cooking using a method of heat transfer called convection. The heat in the water is transferred to the egg whilst the two are in contact with each other. The benefits unlike frying are that the water envelops the egg so it is far easier to get an even cook, and because there is no oil involved the end result is a much healthier alternative. In theory egg poaching can be seen as egg boiling without the shell.

The difficulties in most egg cooking methods arise from the fact than the egg is made out of two separate components (the white and the yolk) and both of those components have different cooking times and temperatures. Now I could go on here and give you a bunch of equations on thermal heat transfers but I’m sure it would bore you to tears. What you do need to bear in mind though is that both the egg white and the egg yolk begin to cook in the 60-70oC temperature range and the egg white begins to cook first. So therefore it makes sense to state that when we are cooking anything egg based we need to at least cook above 60oC.

So why then if we don’t have t cook at the temperature of boiling water (100oC) do most methods insist that the water is boiling or near boiling?  The reason for this is because unlike a shell on egg, the poached egg does not begin a solid object, it begins a liquid and the success of most techniques is based on us being able to turn the egg in to a solid mass as quickly as possible to avoid us having our egg spread itself all over the pan. Higher temperatures speed up the cooking time meaning that the egg has to travel a shorter distance in the water before it begins to cook.

What we are trying to avoid more that anything is the egg hitting the bottom of the pan whilst still being a liquid. For this we need to have one of the following.

1.  A high enough temperature to cook the egg quickly.
2.  A big enough pan so as the egg has longer to travel and in turn more time to cook.
3.  A slow speed in the water, which will again give us more time in which to cook the egg. 

Another important factor is the temperature of the egg before we cook it. It would make good sense to say that the higher the temperature the egg is before it hits the pan the less time again it needs to cook. This is something you should bear in mind if you like me keep your eggs in the fridge. I would recommend you take them out a while in advance.

Here’s an equation we can use (I accept not a very good one)

 (T(e) + T(w) + D)/r+s= Xp 

Where T(e) is the temperature of the egg before poaching T(w) is the water temperature, D is the distance the egg can travel uninterrupted, r is the radius of the egg and s is the speed at which the egg is travelling in the water. Xp is then a number, which sort of determines the likelyhood of whether or not your egg will poach nicely or not. The higher the number the more chance you have. Not very scientific but I really like having equations.

Now we have our faux maths worked out lets get poaching and look at the first method.

 Oh one more thing before we do. My assumptions before this experiment are that we are looking for:

a)     A firmish white with a runny yolk.

b)    A nice rounded compact shape.

c)     The yolk to be covered by the white and as central as possible.

 

A White Chocolate and Frangelico Soufflé

"The only thing that will make a soufflé fall is if it knows you are afraid of it."

James Beard

If there was one dish that summed up the home cooks unnecessary fear though misunderstanding it would be the humble soufflé. Going though the huge list of recipes in cookbooks and on the Internet you would be forgiven for thinking that the ideal recipe was shrouded in mysticism and was lost somewhere in history. Maybe rather than reading though the thousands of differing opinions out there, one would be better off looking for the clues in a Leonardo Da Vinci painting.

Cook at 220, 180, 160, 100, 220 then turn the oven off, use egg yolks, don’t use egg yolks, add cournflour, cook on a hotplate, cook on the bottom of the oven, cook in a vacuum, on so on and on. The list of differing opinions in enough to scare you off ever making one. Which would be a shame, cause not only is making a soufflé as easy as making anything else, it’s also a highly versatile and tasty weapon in any cooks arsenal.

So let us first concentrate at what we are trying to do here.

The Science bit

A soufflé works (rises) because the egg whites, which make up at least 50% of the dish are predominantly (about 90%) made out of water. When we cook the egg whites the water evaporates and creates steam, which as we all know rises.

Of course simply heating egg whites as they are would do nothing. The moisture would simply escape as the egg white is too dense and all we would have is cooked egg white. We need to turn the egg whites into a structure that will hold its shape and has the capacity to contain some of the steam. This is the fundamental reason why whipping the egg whites to a strong foam (small bubbles, tightly packed) is so important. Like the froth on your cappuccino, the size and density of the bubbles are paramount to the stability of the foam.

We could make a soufflé simply by beating some egg whites and sticking them in the oven. However not only would it only taste of egg whites (nothing) but because the foam is weak it would also almost immediately collapse under its own weight. So when we add any other ingredients to our whites, we need to make sure that they will aid in strengthening this foam and well as taste good. To do this, whatever we add should be as thick as possible whilst still having a level of viscosity, which allows it to be incorporated into the egg whites.

So to simplify:

Stiff egg whites + some other tasty thick liquid = any soufflé.

Actually that’s pretty much it but there are a few things we also need to consider.

1. The bubbles in the egg whites do not respond at all well to fat. If you want a demonstration pour some oil into your bubble bath and see what happens. So when thinking about a base we need to minimize the amount of fat also.
2. And when I said tasty it needs to be really tasty, cause whatever your liquid is, it will need to have enough flavour to withstand being diluted by the egg whites which have no flavour. So making a sauce that had a very delicate flavour will probably be lost in the mix. You would be wise in this case to season or sweeten it as much as you can get away with or maybe go with something else.

So that’s about it, let’s soufflé.

About this Blog

The War On Cookbooks

 

I remember a scene quite a few years ago whilst trying to follow a recipe for a simple brie soufflé, where I ended up throwing hard rocks of brie in to the bin over and over again. I never even got around to beating the egg whites and in the end gave up and decided to do some brownies instead. It was years before I attempted the recipe again and unfortunately when I did I came out with similar results. My recipe had been written by a very famous and much respected chef and so despite my continuous failure I persisted, assuming that this was in some way my fault. How could I be getting this wrong, time after time, or how could this decorated chef be fallible on such a simple recipe?

 

Looking back I wasn’t alone. I remember my mother’s frustration at following recipe after recipe to the absolute letter. I remember her excitement before hand and her mild disappointment when serving her children or her dinner party something which was a distant cousin, twice removed from that which had appeared on the pages of her cookbook.  Still she persisted, unwilling to change that which was written in stone in the pages of her Delia smith cookbook. Still clinging to the promise of that gastronomic eureka moment that was almost certainly on its way, courtesy of the new hardback revised edition.

 

My Girlfriend Helen has also been victim to the post recipe comedown, only with her slightly temperamental nature this can sometimes result in me having bowls of pasta or stew flying past my head and going straight to telephone to order a takeaway. 

 

This had to stop.

 

Things are better in our house these days. Not just because Helen is a better cook and I now work full time with food and work in professional kitchens, but mainly because instead of reading recipes and cookbooks I now read about the food itself. What it is, how it cooks, why it cooks, how long it takes to cook at any temperature and in what way. To understand the nature of what your cooking and the science behind the method, means that rather than having to read recipes every time you want to cook something, you can almost work it out for yourself. And whilst you will almost certainly have to refer from time to time to books for inspiration and advice, you will take that advice for what it’s worth and not for what it says it is worth.

 

Learning to cook by copying Gordon Ramsey recipes will not make you the next Gordon Ramsey, just like learning to play the guitar by copying Jimi Hendrix songs will not make you the next Jimi Hendrix. 

 

So I'm going to look at some basic cooking techniques and recipes, but in little more detail than normal. I promise to never give you exact measurements, timings or temperatures for any recipes, except where absolutely necessary. But instead tell you about why the food should be cooked that way and so hopefully you can work that out for yourself, for your own oven and for your own ingredients. We all have different ovens, different environments and different farms on which different food grows and lives, so why the hell we all expect our different chickens to cook for the same amount of time is beyond comprehension. Food is cooked when it's done and not when it’s supposed to be.

 

I hope you enjoy some of what I write and if you have any suggestions of your own please send them in.