How to Perfectly Poach Eggs

Featured Pro: Curtis Stone
Category: Cooking
Time: 2:57


CURTIS STONE: Hey, I’m Curtis Stone, and I’ve got a GMC Trade Secret that’s going to let you serve up breakfast just like the pros.

You know what it’s like when you go to a café and you get those perfect poached eggs. Here’s how they do it.

What I’ve got is a big pot of boiling water. Now, it needs to be the rapid boil, and I’m going to add one ingredient that’s going to make all the difference – some white wine vinegar. Any sort of vinegar will actually work, because the acidity of the vinegar is going to make the water acidulated.

Now, what that does is the albumin of the egg, which is the egg white, just around the yolk, is drawn together because it’s got such a high concentration of protein in it when it hits the acid. Now, I know that sounds a bit technical, but all you have to remember is put a bit of vinegar into your water before you do your poached eggs.

Now, the other little secret I’ve got is to crack your eggs into a little dish before you put it into the water. If you crack it here and drop it in, you can imagine it sort of hits the water with a bit of force and spreads out. That’s not what you want. What you want to happen is to get your eggs and just lower it in nice and gently. Okay, so you just lower it in. So it just holds together when it hits that water.

Now, the reason you want it at a nice, rapid boil is because when that egg goes in there, it’s going to cool it down a little bit. The temperature of the egg is going to bring down the temperature of the water. You don’t want it to come off the boil, because it’s only going to be in there for a couple of minutes.

Now, another thing that you can do, if you’re going to serve a poached egg on a Caesar salad or something and you’re going to have a group of people come over, poach your eggs ahead of time and then get yourself something like this, a little dish with a little bit of ice in it. Take the poached eggs out and put them into the ice bath. And just before you’re ready to serve, you can just pick them up with your hand, drop them back in the boiling water for 30 seconds, and they’re good to go. So that’s a little cheat’s way of doing it as well.

All right, let’s have a look at these bad boys. Okay, so let’s have a little fun with our eggs; back in 30 seconds and they’re done. So the way I like to serve my poached eggs is I don’t want to grill tomatoes and bacon and all that sort of stuff. I just toast some bread, I butter it, and then I get some beautiful smoked salmon and make a couple of rosettes with a little bit of water crest and you're ready to serve. Then I bring my plate over here.

This little crust of the bread, I always use it, because I’m never going to eat that piece. So what I do is I just use that little piece for when you pull your egg out of the water. Just see that little bit of water that falls off? I just set my egg on here, because what happens is that just soaks up any of that excess liquid. Then I just transfer it straight onto my plate. You’ll never end up with soggy toast.

Okay, so, again, you just pick that up, bring it over, transfer it, and then just flip it over onto your smoked salmon. I’ve got a little bit of parsley. And then when your guests get your poached eggs, you get your knife and fork, you break into them, and the yolk should still be beautiful, yellow and delicious. Look at that.

I’m Curtis Stone, and that’s my GMC Trade Secret.