Cooking/Recipes

How to poach an egg (and not just the yolk)

I loved poached eggs on toast.  I especially love poached eggs on English muffins with slices of avocado.  My problem is that many times, I lose at least 50% of the egg white when I poach an egg.  It turns into ghostly wisps that separate from the main egg section, and I end up just washing it into the drain or garbage.

I recently read that to make a good poached egg you should boil water in a deep skillet, add a little salt and vinegar into the water, and then use a little bowl to ease each egg in one at a time when the water reaches a rolling boil.  I tried this yesterday, and I don’t know what I did wrong, but one of the eggs was a complete disaster.  The other one was undercooked, and I didn’t drain the water off well enough, so when I broke the yolk, it mixed with the water and was disgusting.

Today, though, they turned out EXCELLENTLY.  The combo of the vinegar and water keeps the egg in a nice compact, fluffy-looking mound!  Here is how they look in the skillet:

If I was using my former method (using a tiny pot, bringing the water to a boil, and then adding two eggs at once to the water), the water would be full of stringy, wispy egg whites.

I boiled the eggs for 4 minutes, and the yolks were perfect – not too hard and not too soft.  This method is more work and more resource intensive, but the eggs turn out so much better.