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Saturday morning breakfastFebruary 28, 2009

I decided this morning to try my hand at poaching eggs. It worked out, and I was inclined to make a couple of fun sides to go with them.

Here is the result:

I have never been able to make poached eggs turn out right before. It occurred to me that I could use a ladle to lower the egg into the water. I don’t know why nobody seems to do this because it works wonderfully well.

Lamb breakfast sausage mixed liberally with maple syrup made a great accompanying dish. I’ve also recently formed the habit of using a spritzer to spray olive oil on my toast.

The coffee on tap this morning was my favorite of the five that I have been roasting: Ethiopian Yirgacheffe. It is the only coffee that I know of that can be accurately described as fruity — almost lemon-berry. It still has a nice rich flavor base, though. I have been preparing it at a medium-to-light roast.

Fail-proof poaching

It seems like the stars must be aligned to poach eggs with the traditional methods, but I’ve found a way that still retains the texture and flavor of poached eggs with a much easier process.

I used a tiny personal-sized sauce pan because my electric range hardly puts out enough heat to get a large pot boiling, especially in time for breakfast. The right heat level of the water seems to be just below a vigorous boil — the kind where pea-sized bubbles are regularly forming on the surface. This is probably normally too hot for poaching, but the ladle absorbs some of the heat.

On a tip from Food Network, I put about two tablespoons of balsamic vinegar into the pan. This is supposed help the texture of the egg.

I sprayed the ladle very lightly with olive oil just to keep the egg from sticking to it, and I broke one egg into the ladle. After this, I lowered the ladle slowly into the water and held it just below the surface for about 20 seconds. I let the ladle drift to the bottom of the pan after that. Once the egg was beginning to firm a little — after about 2 or 3 minutes — I turned the ladle over and gently dropped the egg onto the bottom of the pan. I waited until the egg had floated back to the top of the water before removing it with a straining ladle.

The balsamic vinegar left a ruddy residue on the eggs that was very aesthetically pleasing. They also tasted delicious!

Here are my utensils:

— Alan Henager

Food