Breakfast - Poached eggs

This post isn't about the potatoes, and isn't about the bacon. Stay tuned for a future bacon post because that bacon in the picture came in to my house as pork belly, and is now rosemary and thyme bacon.

This post is about the poached eggs. Poached eggs are so easy to mess up and there's so many conflicting sets of instructions, some of which advise you to do some really weird and possibly unhealthy things (like cooking them wrapped in plastic wrap) that if you're just getting going with cooking and you want to be healthy and simple, it needs writing down so that you can see it.

I learned this method from Serious Eats - a website I HIGHLY recommend. They used to publish a few more well explained techniques and recipes each week, but things change and evolve, and I'm not upset with how it is now.

See that white - cooked, but not completely solid. See the yolk - slightly thickened, but not set yet? That's how *I* like my poached eggs. You can decide how you like yours - do you like a softer white? A firmer yolk? A softer yolk? I'm going to tell you how to achieve my perfect egg, and how you change it to achieve yours. My recommendation is to try it my way, so that you know what you want to change and then try the changes after. It takes less than 5 minutes per egg, so you can egg-speriment. (I am not sorry for the pun).

When you crack an egg, you get two main components - the yolk, and the white. You'll probably already know that the white has a firmer part and a loose, runnier part. That looser, more runny part ends up not helping in the presentation of your egg. The other main difference between the loose and firm whites is that the loose whites will flow through a sieve but the firm part won't! That makes it really easy to get rid of. I used to balance the sieve in the sink and crack the egg in to it before one day realizing that I have a bowl that the sieve will sit in and I can just set that next to where I'm cooking.

The next thing to address is temperature control. This is your main source of control for the whole recipe. The hotter you cook it, the more runny the yolk will be by the time the white is cooked to your liking. So, your baseline, down here at nearly sea level (sorry, Denver Imgurians. You'll have to provide feedback here for how it works for you), is that you want the water to be hot enough that there are bubbles leaving the bottom of the pan, but not reaching the surface. That's in the 90's of Celcius, about 190-200 Fahrenheit.

Let's put it together...

Get your water up to temperature, crack the egg into the sieve and roll it around a little to let most of the runny white drop through, and use a spatula to scrape the underside fairly clean of the loose white, but don't be too fastidious about it. Now take the sieve to the water, holding it so that you can tip the egg out of the sieve and straight in to the water, without falling through air much. Use the spatula to gently tease it away from the bottom of the pot of water because it'll stick until a few seconds after it goes from clear to actually white. After that, wait 3 minutes, then scoop it out - ideally with a slotted spoon or wire spider, and serve it immediately.

For more:
https://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2014/04/foolproof-poached-eggs-food-lab-recipe.html