3 Easy Ways to Make Poached Eggs

Oh yeah, liquid gold.

Alright, poaching an egg.

This is one of those techniques that freaks people out

I don't know why, poaching an egg is super easy.

It's kind of fail-safe and in fact there's 3 different ways

to make it perfectly, I'm going to show you all of them.

Alright, so first things first:

you're gonna poach an egg, you need eggs.

We use large eggs in the Bon Appetit test kitchen.

I just believe in large eggs, jumbos sort of freak me out

for some reason.

We're gonna come over here,

and all you need is simmering water.

You're gonna want to make a nice vortex.

We're talking like, tornado, mach 5 situation.

So the egg goes right in.

Alright so how long are we cooking this egg for?

I say two and a half minutes and I always use my phone

it's the one thing Siri is good for.

But it's probably been half a minute,

I'm setting this for two.

It's really cooking right here in front of us.

So let's pick this guy up.

Oh, looking so nice.

So this to me feels like, baby cheek.

Like a nice plump baby's cheek.

So we didn't season the water and we didn't season the egg

at all so I like to aggressively season it afterwards.

Totally into it.

Alright, now I'm going to show you a style of poached egg

that I saw a lot in Australia.

Every place I went to for brunch, and they're really big

on breakfast there, had the poached egg with the yolk

kind of at one end and this long tail like a comet's tail

of the white stretched out behind it.

So I'm gonna do the vortex again this time I'm using a whisk

'cause this is such a deep pot

kinda you just gotta trust the wave.

Do you see that?

Look it's like space, it's outer space.

Let's see this guy.

It's a little more oblong.

This is like crazy, Calabrian chili oil.

A little yogurt to put out the fire.

Always with the salt.

This is gonna be a super spicy bite.

It tastes more Australian somehow.

Who's hungry, is anybody hungry?

Would you eat an egg if I made eggs?

(muffled responses)

Oh okay.

They're gonna eat the eggs.

So the trick with doing big batch poached eggs

One is that you need kind of a wider pot

so that you have a lot of surface area on the bottom.

The other trick to it is you're gonna put the eggs in

about 30 seconds apart.

But the key thing is an ice bath.

This is gonna stop the cooking of the eggs immediately.

And then you can store them in the cold water.

I would say at least 3 days no problem

and then when it's time for breakfast you bring another

pot of water to a simmer, lower the eggs back in

and then you can take it to the plate.

Grits.

Who wants an egg, anybody?

I do

So there you have it, we did a perfect egg for one,

we did perfect eggs for if you're Australian,

and we did perfect eggs for a crowd.

So now if you're not making poached eggs,

what are you doing?