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Much ado about Poached eggs

I have a weird relationship with eggs.

Initially, I'd only eat 'em hard boiled or in frittata form.
Then there was a period of time in my late teens, where I was forbidden to eat any due to an illness. I stayed away from them out of habit from then on, and hardly ate any through my early 20s.
And now I seem to have moved a step further in my "egg" relationship this past quarter-year- I crave for eggs which have been poached till barely set.

Before I say another word, if you cook eggs, you can already surmise the big issue here- for some scientific reason, eggs poach best when super fresh; refrigerated eggs just look terrible when poached the traditional way. Unfortunately, living in Los Angeles does not equate to living on a farm- leading to a slight difficulty in satisfying my current poached egg obsession.

I coaxed and pulled and messed in my kitchen on the supposedly "fresh" eggs from Trader Joe's, resulting in decent eggs which just didn't LOOK pretty :(- and how can we bear ugliness on a plate?! So after much contention, and much heart-ache, and much scouring of stores, I located an egg poacher at Linen'n Things, quietly hidden in a corner- I guess folks don't like poached eggs much. Keep in mind that egg poachers are really glorified steamers, so we are cheating a bit here.

So last night I got home having made this wonderful acquisition and decided to try it out at 10pm. Hubby was intrigued by my loving cradling in the arms of said poaching pan, and gallantly volunteered to eat three (!!!), hard poached. I ran to the kitchen in sheer joy, first making sure I took off my pale pink Cashmere sweater, lest I spilled stuff, which I am often known to do.

The water heated in the pan, as I sprayed olive oil (very very lightly- greasy poached eggs is NOT what I want) inside the individual poachers and plopped in the eggs. They looked so cute sitting there! As soon as the water boiled, the poachers were loaded on, the lid shut and the water reduced to a simmer. My soft poached egg came out looking adorable, in 4 minutes, while hubby's hard poached eggs came out looking ethereal in 6 minutes. The egg tends to stick to the walls of the poacher, so you do need to run a sharp knife round the edges, turn the poacher upside down on a serving plate, and whack the back of the poacher gently (sounds a bit S&M-ish, yes?) I tried a bite from hubby's plate, since I hadn't tried hard poached eggs before, and I have to admit, this beats boiling any day- the eggs just come out fluffy as a cloud and super comforting. I prefer my soft version though, and who knows- I may try Eggs Benedict next!!!

Warning: Doctors say we should limit our egg intake to 3-4eggs (with yolk) a week, owing to the cholestrol content.

Posted by Shweta Mehrotra Gahlawat at 12:32 PM