The War On Cookbooks

50 Ways to Poach and Egg part 2

The Vortex

Possibly the coolest looking way to poach and egg and definitely the most popular is the vortex method.

The idea behind this method is creating a whirlpool inside a pan of simmering water using a whisk and then dropping the egg into the spinning water.  If we take a look at our rubbish (yes Dave I know it’s not dimensionally accurate), yet informative equation we see that the number we are most interested in is ‘D’ the distance travelled.

(T(e) + T(w) + D)/r+s= Xp  (see first blog for explination )

The temperature is constant with the last experiment but even though the size of the pan is smaller, the vortex moves the egg round and round the pan increasing the distance that it travels before hitting the bottom.

The other factor in the equation that is effected as well will be ‘s’ the speed of the egg in the water. If the Vortex is too fast and the pan to shallow then we may still have the same problem as before.

Ideally then and contrary to popular opinion it still should be an advantage to have the biggest pan possible, even if you are spinning the water.

The Experiment

To do the vortex experiment I incorporated three different methods into one.

The first method would be Eye of the Storm. Which is basically taking the egg and placing it slap bang in the centre of the pan so the egg spins around on itself.

The second method would be the Orbiting Egg method. Where the egg is placed on the outside of the pan, spins slowly towards the centre of the pan and then in on itself.

The third method is the use of vinegar to coagulate the egg. There are a lot of people out there who reckon it’s a useless addition… we shall see.

An Egg Poached in Asparagus Velouté, with parmesan and truffle oil.

Asparagus season in upon us, and it's traditional around these parts to go out and buy big bunches of the stuff and throw them into every dish imaginable, regardless of whether or not they go together. 

One pairing that does definitely go together is asparagus and egg. A nice poached egg with a few spears of the green stuff can be one of those simple pleasures that remind you of an easier life. One without the need for expensive ingredients, scientific analysis, complicated high tech cooking techniques and fancy pants plating.

But isn't it all a bit boring ?

...I think maybe it is.

Looking back on my egg poaching blog and the ones yet to come ( I have written some of them but I keep getting distracted by shiny things and posting those instead) there was a definite need to try poaching eggs in a thicker liquid than water. So being the sort to do so I put the two projects together and here we are.

The Velouté

The basic idea of making any veloute is simply to break down the vegetable in a simmering liquid, blitz it in a mixer and then pass it though a sieve. That's it...simple.

So first of all I threw some finely chopped onion and the roughly chopped asparagus into a pan with a little butter and left until both started to soften. As soon as the asparagus was softening I threw in some chicken stock (vegetarians, veg stock will do nicely), some water and some milk. Enough stock to cover the asparagus and a little of the other two to top the mixture up. The more creamy you want your end product the more milk you add. You could even add cream as well.

Leave this on a heavy simmer until you can see the asparagus is soft enough to fall apart without much help. At this stage take it off the heat.

Spoon your asparagus into a blender and top up with the liquid (Don't over fill your blender. Do this in stages. The mixture is hot and very dangerous, so be careful). Blitz until smooth then pass though sieve into a clean pan.

Heat this mixture and season well to taste.

The Egg

Once you are happy with the veloute have your eggs ready to poach.

Bring your veloute to the boil then turn off the heat and drop your egg/eggs into the centre (if doing more than one make sure you spread them out). The mixture should be thick enough to stop it from spreading and hot enough to quickly start coagulation.

Wait for 2-3 mins or until the egg (remove with a slotted spoon to check) looks almost cooked. The egg will cook for longer in the bowl so we don't want to over do it.

Remove the egg and lay it in the bowl. Then pour over the veloute though another sieve (incase you have any thin pieces of egg).

The Rest

I added some thin strips of Parmesan, some crispy croutons and a few drops of white truffle oil (the last addition I highly recommend.)

and voila

 

Simply delicious. Do try.

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.