Kurt R.A. Giambastiani

Yes, I can get a bit…obsessed…at times.

My good friends over at Cheap Seat Eats blog turned me on to a video in which Wylie Dufresne shows a new way to poach an egg. If you’ve been reading here for a while, you know I’ve been working to perfect the various methods of cooking the venerable Hen’s Egg. I just about have the hard-cooked egg down pat (thanks to my friend and author Barb Hendee), but the perfect poached egg has eluded me.

I’ve tried many methods. I’ve tried classic out-of-the-shell methods like the dead-drop (sticks to bottom of pot), the swirl/vortex (still all thready), and the Martha Stewart cook-in-spoon-followed-by-scissoring-off-the-threads-to-make-it-look-nice-nice method (too obsessive, even for me). I’ve tried several in-the-shell methods, too, from the classic 5-minute egg (impossible to peel), to David Chang’s one-hour slow-cook method (too unreliable and never cooked well enough).

Nothing has pleased me. Here’s what I want in a poached egg:

• Firm, cooked white
• Creamy, orange yolk, almost like a sauce when it spills
• Enough of a “sag” in the cooked egg so that it looks poached, not hard-cooked

Dufresne’s method, based on modernist techniques and analysis, gives us a perfect, in-shell, poached/soft-cooked egg. I tried it once. Damned near perfect. I tried it again. Damned near perfect again. My only complaint was that the egg stood a bit too tall, and was a bit “too” cooked at the prescribed cooking time.

So, I set about performing a time trial. Four eggs. Four cook times, ranging from Dufresne’s prescribed 5:45 min, and downward.

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