Perfect Poached Eggs

Since a raw egg cooked in simmering water wants to spread out in all directions before it sets, it’s this latter issue that’s the trickiest to overcome. I was determined to figure out a solution, and I would have plenty of help: There are dozens of recipes, essays, and videos claiming to produce perfect results. I would try them all and see where I landed.

First I experimented with the more novel suggestions I found. These ranged from poaching eggs in a muffin tin in the oven to microwaving each egg individually in a small bowl of shallow water to parcooking them in the shell before releasing them directly into the simmering water. I wasn’t too surprised when most of these ideas proved to be dead ends. Conventional methods worked better, but they also had their limitations. The most common trick was to swirl the water around the eggs to create a vortex that kept the white from spreading, all the while folding any loose stragglers back on the yolk. The whirlpool worked, but it meant I could only poach one or two eggs a time. Another approach involved lowering an egg into the water in a large metal spoon and keeping it there while using a second spoon to block the loose white from straying too far. The results were perfect—but who wants to juggle spoons like that to cook a single egg?

The most useful trick I found didn’t try to corral the white during cooking but instead started by draining the raw eggs in a colander. At first I found this step counterintuitive—wouldn’t all the white just drain off through the holes? It turns out that every egg contains two kinds of white, thick and thin. The thicker portion clings more tightly to the yolk, while the thinner portion is looser and can break away and slip through the colander holes. It is this thinner white that is most prone to spreading out into wispy tendrils in the water, so eliminating it went a long way toward fixing this issue. I also found that starting with the freshest eggs possible increased the chance that more of the white was thick, so less of it would drain away, leaving me with a plumper poached egg.

I next tried a common method targeted at a different issue: ensuring that the yolks stay runny while the whites, which solidify at a much higher temperature, reach the right degree of tender firmness. This approach calls for adding a few splashes of vinegar to the simmering water before slipping in the eggs. Acid lowers the water’s pH, which makes the proteins in the white set faster. The only issue? For the vinegar to be effective, you have to add so much that it gives the eggs a sour taste. I found that the upper limit was ½ teaspoon per cup of water, which wasn’t enough to be much help. But there was something else I could add that also makes egg proteins bond faster: salt. Using vinegar and salt together meant I didn’t need much of either one. After a few tests, I worked out my formula: 1 tablespoon vinegar and 1 teaspoon salt to 6 cups water.

But there was still more I could do to keep the whites tidy—I could get the eggs into the water as gently as possible. Gingerly sliding them into the water from bowls held close to the water’s surface, as many recipes suggest, kept the white contained, but pouring multiple bowls at once—I was poaching four eggs to serve two people—was awkward. Cracking all the eggs into a 2-cup liquid measuring cup and pouring them in one by one at different spots in the water was easier. Plus, I could retrieve them in the order they were added, so they cooked to the same degree. It made sense at this point to switch from a large saucepan to a broader Dutch oven, which made bringing the measuring cup close to the water easier.

After bringing the water to a boil, I added the vinegar and salt, deposited the drained eggs around the water’s surface, and then considered whether to lower the heat to a bare simmer or shut it off completely and cover the pot, allowing residual heat to do the cooking. I’d seen recipes calling for both methods, and after a quick test, I settled on the latter for two reasons: First, even though it was very gentle, the residual heat was still enough to allow the egg whites to set and provided extra insurance that the yolk would stay beautifully runny. Second, in the covered environment, steam could cook the white at the very top of the eggs, which can be the most stubborn to set, without constantly turning the egg over in the water. Though timing varied slightly depending on the size of the eggs, I found that it took about 3 minutes for the white, including the top, to become nicely opaque. Plus, one advantage of poaching eggs as opposed to cooking them in their shells is that you can actually see the results and return the eggs to the pot if necessary.

And with that, I really had it: a foolproof recipe for perfect poached eggs. As ambitious as it had seemed at first, poaching eggs now felt like a quick, simple way to add protein to any meal, from eggs Benedict and corned beef hash to a salad or pasta to fried rice to polenta.