Raid the Fridge Fridays: How to Poach Eggs Perfectly

Throw away your silicone cups and the microwaveable moulds, it's time to tame poached eggs

In what now feels like another life, my chef career transpired over three busy, grease-stained years, hopping between different brunch cafes. Customers would pile in at 7:30 for their cappuccino to go and I would be ignored to my delight, usually because I was too busy prepping something (ahem eating something). My services weren’t required until later in the morning, and in each of the brunch places, these services revolved around egg making. To be more specific, poaching.

Eggs Benedict is a phenomenon - in the cafe where I worked in New Zealand, it was known purely by its nickname ‘Bene’ like it was another member of the kitchen team. It never failed to astound me how much people loved eating poached eggs. Forget Bene and his silky hollandaise, a simple plate of poached eggs on toast was a favourite breakfast order. Why though? Is it because we struggle to make them at home so we pay a premium for a (badly paid) chef to poach them instead?

Each of these cafes taught me different techniques for poaching eggs and I would follow their rules to the letter. It’s only since I no longer have to poach 60+ eggs a day that I’ve started to take pleasure in cooking and eating them myself. Three years since my last professional poached egg, I’m a happy home-egg-poacher, taking the skills of the cafe to my own kitchen, and now to yours too, dear reader! If you love poached eggs but can’t quite master the courage to cook your own for your weekend breakfast (or your raid the fridge lunch), then this is the guide for you.

So, first thing’s first…

There are so many egg contraptions, it’s difficult to keep track. If you have one of those silicone egg poachers, you won’t be needing them here. Not to blow my own trumpet (and it’s not even my trumpet to blow, I’m just the messenger here), once you’re using this technique, you won’t even be tempted by those little boob pouches.

To business.

This poached egg… ‘trick’ I suppose is the best word for it, is one with vinegar at its base. Make sure you always have a bottle of clinical, pure white vinegar in your cupboard, ideally cleaning cupboard because you won’t want this near salad dressing. This is your poached egg vinegar.

Then you need a deep saucepan. This can be one you use for soup or poaching chicken. It doesn’t have to be massive. This is something I’ve learnt since home poaching. At cafes, we used stock pots for poached eggs, the deeper the better. An avalanche of eggs would be cracked in, one after the other, floating through the water like translucent tadpoles. At home, I’m never going to haul out a stock pot for four poached eggs so I do without and it works just as well.

Fill your saucepan with cold water, around three-quarters full. Then pour in big open-throated glugs of that crude vinegar. Don’t hold back. Upturn the bottle.

Why so much vinegar?

The vinegar sets the egg white before it is cooked. Without vinegar, the egg white will float around like ink in water and, once it eventually sets from the heat, it will be misshapen and frilly. With vinegar, the white sets in a natural tear drop shape - well, it will if your pan is really deep. In a normal-sized pan, your eggs will at least look poached.

Bring the pan of vinegared water to the boil - if you’re cooking breakfast around it, you’ll receive a lovely vinegar-scented face steam. Extremely cleansing. Once the water is bubbling fiercely, it’s time to crack in the eggs.

Thanks to that magical vinegar, you can crack them in one after the other and the whites won’t muddle and blend. Crack into the centre where the water is boiling vigorously as it acts as a whirlpool, shaping and coaxing your egg white to stay intact.

Keep your eye on it, if the water boils close to the brim, lower the heat slightly. Let it stay at a rolling boil.

After 3 minutes, lift one egg with a slotted spoon and give it a poke. If the egg white is still liquid inside, return it to the water for another 30 seconds. Scoop them out and set them on kitchen paper to soak up the water.

Don’t worry too much about the vinegar flavour, especially if you’re eating your poached egg with hollandaise. However, if you’d like to, simply boil the kettle and ‘rinse’ your eggs in hot water.

And that’s all there is to homemade poached eggs! To summarise, you need:

• White vinegar (and a well-ventilated kitchen!)

• A big-ish saucepan filled with water

• Fresh eggs - ideally the fresher the better as the white loosens with time

• High heat and a rolling boil

We need to forget the recipes that strictly order us to use a shallow pan, barely simmering water and silicone moulds. All those instructions are simply going to hold us back from the easiest poached eggs technique I’ve ever tried.

So, the next time a brunch cafe waves his menu of eggs Benedict temptingly before your eyes, keep in mind you can make that eggs Bene too… and probably even better.