Making Poached Eggs

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Anne Moody. I'm a personal chef and a food writer. My column appears regularly in "Simply the Best" magazine in Delray Beach, Florida, but I'm here today on behalf of Expert Village, and I'm gonna talk about eggs. One of the most useful ways to prepare eggs is to poach them. And there's a wonderful method that I learned from a hotel chef where you take the most enormous pot of boiling water you can find, a really deep stock pot. Theoretically, what will happen is, you put some vinegar in the water, about two tablespoons. That will help the white of the egg coagulate and stick together. And then you drop the egg in the boiling water. When it's raw, it will sink to the bottom. It will sit there until it begins to cook. And when it cooks it will rise to the surface. So, here we go. It almost always works. There goes our egg. Oops, the water is boiling too much. The water should be barely at a simmer. Just have to turn that down. And when the eggs rise to the top, the point of telling you about this is you can fix a dozen or two dozen poached eggs and then you can hold them overnight if you want to in a basin of ice water. And they'll keep, the centers will remain soft. They'll keep their shapes. You can trim these little fuzzy things off when you get ready to serve them. Like so with a pair of scissors. So you have a beautiful poached egg. This means that you can present eggs Benedict or any fancy poached egg brunch dish you want to, to as many people as you like. All you have to do is just heat them up gently and they're all done. So you put them in there. Now, our egg is actually, it needs to be scraped off the bottom just a little bit. And it's about to rise to the top. When it does, we'll catch it with a slotted spoon, or whatever you have handy. Here it comes. And there you have a perfect poached egg. You can see how nice and soft it is. You plunge it in the ice water to stop the cooking process, and simply leave it there until you're ready to serve it. If you like this, check out my other cooking tips on Expert Village."