Egg Poaching

Recently I've been trying to cook more, to try new recipes, and to learn new things in the kitchen. (My roommate may or may not love this, since I make her help me eat the leftovers.) A few days ago I purchased 2 cod fillets from HEB (local grocery store). I had no idea how to cook it, so I've been looking online for different recipes. One common way to cook fish, I learned, is poaching it. I've heard of poaching, but I had no idea how to do it. This is why the internet is great; I just googled "how to poach cod" and within minutes I was an expert on the theory of how to do it. (One website even had a video!) I have a recipe that I'm going to try soon that uses poaching as the method to cook my cod. (I'll let you know how it goes.)

As I was talking to my roommate about poaching fish, she asked if it was done in a similar way to poaching eggs. I wasn't sure. Believe it or not I've never poached an egg. In fact, I've never even eaten a poached egg. Actually, I didn't even know how to poach an egg.

Tonight, that changed.

Again, the internet came to my rescue. By googling "how to poach an egg," I found several websites to help me out. I went mostly off this one. It seemed easy enough. So when I got home tonight, I gave it a try.

I was particularly curious about step 4. It says that before adding the egg, I needed to "spin" (i.e., stir) the water to "cool down the water." I'm pretty sure that doesn't do much in terms of cooling. I was curious what difference the swirl made. So I decided to cook two eggs: one with the swirl, one without. First the swirl. The result looked like this:


Not bad. I still wasn't sure what the swirl bought me until I tried it without. Here is the result:


As you can see, the white of the egg went everywhere! I'm now convinced that the swirl has nothing to do with the temperature of the water and everything to do with keeping the egg confined. You learn something new everyday!

So I had breakfast for dinner, adding two pieces of toast and a glass of milk to eat with my eggs. So how did the eggs taste? They were great. I love the runny yokes (I make sunny-side up eggs that way), although it's tricky to get all the water off. All in all, a culinary success.

(Oh...and the egg on the left is the swirl, and the one on the right is sans-swirl. You can see there is a difference in appearance! The swirl is much nicer looking.)