Sous Vide Experiment #4: Poached Eggs
Dec. 2nd, 2009 03:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
coraaThis is my second attempt at poached eggs. No pictures this time, because, to be perfectly honest, the eggs came out ug-lee, and the point of food posts is not to nauseate people. ;)
This was also the first real Not Really A Success with the sous vide. I'm not sure whether I'm doing something wrong, or if the finished product is just not my thing, or what. We'll see.
So I went to the website with the lovely time tables, which has a whole page on cooking poached eggs in the sous vide. It says that the so-called "perfect" sous vide egg is cooked at 148F for 45 minutes to an hour, at which point the yolk and the white have both reached a soft set. So I tried that. So that I could monitor the doneness, I kept one egg in the shell, but removed the other from the shell and tucked it into the corner of a sous vide bag.
After an hour at 148F, the egg white in the bag felt absolutely liquid to the touch. Now, I'm not fussy about many things. The list of foods I won't eat fits on one hand. And I like soft boiled eggs, softly poached eggs, eggs with runny yolks... but I don't like eggs with too-soft whites, where the white is watery. They always feel... eeurgh. (This prejudice is only against whole solitary eggs. I don't object at all to the very wet eggs that make up the sauce in spaghetti carbonara, or to raw eggs in cookie dough, or to raw egg meringues, or etc. etc. It's just for things like fried eggs, boiled eggs, etc.)
So, I thought, well, maybe I'll try a little hotter. Maybe 152F. Let that go for an hour.
At that point, they were kind of set... but when I let the one egg out of the bag and cracked the other, the white was so soft it slid off the egg and fell in a slightly watery little puddle. The yolk held together and didn't collapse; actually the yolk was beautiful, with a warm, soft, fudgy texture. Not quite runny, not quite set. The yolk was great. But the white was just unappealing.
I wound up mashing the yolk into the white (at which point the aesthetics were much better, and the yolk texture made the too-soft white less objectionable), and spreading it on an English muffin with a little butter. And it was good like that.
If I could get an egg with that kind of soft, set but tender yolk, but a white that at very least held together and didn't fall right off the egg, that'd be excellent. Maybe I need to ignore the recommended temperatures and experiment with quite a bit hotter -- 156F or 158F -- or go longer. I dunno. Or maybe I'm just too squidgy about wet egg whites, and the problem is with that, not with the egg.
Will experiment more later. At least eggs are cheap!
Tonight is poached salmon and parsnip puree.
(Oh, and as a coda to yesterday's experiment post: after chilling overnight, the pot de creme actually did set up perfectly, somewhere between pudding and custard. Apparently the recipe was fine, but 4 hours in the fridge wasn't enough. Good to know!)
This was also the first real Not Really A Success with the sous vide. I'm not sure whether I'm doing something wrong, or if the finished product is just not my thing, or what. We'll see.
So I went to the website with the lovely time tables, which has a whole page on cooking poached eggs in the sous vide. It says that the so-called "perfect" sous vide egg is cooked at 148F for 45 minutes to an hour, at which point the yolk and the white have both reached a soft set. So I tried that. So that I could monitor the doneness, I kept one egg in the shell, but removed the other from the shell and tucked it into the corner of a sous vide bag.
After an hour at 148F, the egg white in the bag felt absolutely liquid to the touch. Now, I'm not fussy about many things. The list of foods I won't eat fits on one hand. And I like soft boiled eggs, softly poached eggs, eggs with runny yolks... but I don't like eggs with too-soft whites, where the white is watery. They always feel... eeurgh. (This prejudice is only against whole solitary eggs. I don't object at all to the very wet eggs that make up the sauce in spaghetti carbonara, or to raw eggs in cookie dough, or to raw egg meringues, or etc. etc. It's just for things like fried eggs, boiled eggs, etc.)
So, I thought, well, maybe I'll try a little hotter. Maybe 152F. Let that go for an hour.
At that point, they were kind of set... but when I let the one egg out of the bag and cracked the other, the white was so soft it slid off the egg and fell in a slightly watery little puddle. The yolk held together and didn't collapse; actually the yolk was beautiful, with a warm, soft, fudgy texture. Not quite runny, not quite set. The yolk was great. But the white was just unappealing.
I wound up mashing the yolk into the white (at which point the aesthetics were much better, and the yolk texture made the too-soft white less objectionable), and spreading it on an English muffin with a little butter. And it was good like that.
If I could get an egg with that kind of soft, set but tender yolk, but a white that at very least held together and didn't fall right off the egg, that'd be excellent. Maybe I need to ignore the recommended temperatures and experiment with quite a bit hotter -- 156F or 158F -- or go longer. I dunno. Or maybe I'm just too squidgy about wet egg whites, and the problem is with that, not with the egg.
Will experiment more later. At least eggs are cheap!
Tonight is poached salmon and parsnip puree.
(Oh, and as a coda to yesterday's experiment post: after chilling overnight, the pot de creme actually did set up perfectly, somewhere between pudding and custard. Apparently the recipe was fine, but 4 hours in the fridge wasn't enough. Good to know!)