I bet he ended up with egg on his face.


getting my coat...

Ideally you want one hand under the chickens bum waiting for it to come out

I remember reading you need to wait for the egg to be exactly 36 hours old to be perfect for this.

The thing is, fresh eggs have seriously wet whites. As they age, water evaporates through the shell and the white becomes thicker. You can't make a decent meringue from fresh eggs, and however you cook them they just come out wet because they are.

36 hours sounds perfectly reasonable for a good poached egg. One thing is a fact; you need to adjust the cooking to fit the size and age of the egg.

i use one of these, just add a little butter to each cup, to make near perfect poached eggs every time …



poached eggs on top of smoked or boil in the bag fish served on toast for breakfast, lover'ly …

I have one of those but I found that there'd always be some egg white stuck to the cup and the only way to remove it would be brillo pad, which removed the teflon where the egg white was stuck, despite more than adequate buttering. Besides, you're not really poaching eggs then are you?

I realised I had two boxes of eggs bought from the same farm shop a week apart so I decided to do a bit of an experiment. I think we can assume the eggs are roughly the same size and have come from similar chickens fed the same feed.

I poached them both in the same pan, with clean water for each. The pan was left to heat for the same time on the ring so it was approximately the same temperature. The eggs were poached for the same time. I used the 'vortex' method with nothing added to the water .

The fresher egg came out if anything slightly underdone, with a bit of the white still slightly 'runny' . The older egg came out overdone - the yolk was more or less completely set. Also the newer egg looked much better; the white had a folded look and it was more spherical. Whereas the older egg's white had set very uniformly and it was very flat - in fact it looked like a well cooked fried egg more than a poached one.

Nevertheless both were very tasty .

The conclusion I would come to is if you're going for presentation, get a fresh egg. If you're just looking for something to have on toast of a Sunday morning, an older egg will do just fine as long as you keep an eye on it when cooking.

Jon

That's the one.