Finally, the perfect soft boiled egg

[MajorChode]

It's actually not boiled at all. I cooked a half a dozen eggs in my sous vide setup at 149 degrees F for 75 minutes. The results were incredible. The whites of the eggs were still soft, although cooked through and the yolks were just able to hold their shape and were custard like.

You can see an example of the results by scrolling down about halfway into Doug Baldwin's guide:
http://amath.colorado.edu/~baldwind/sous-vide.html

After cooking I put them in the fridge. To serve I just take a butter knife and tap a circle around the top of the egg and remove the cap. The egg will then pour out of the shell with a little shaking. I put two of them in a small bowl with a little salt and pepper, then nuke it in the microwave till warm and serve with a toasted English muffin and some of my homemade yogurt.

[pengillian101]

1. I'm sorry, but I see huge humor here.

75 minutes to get a soft boiled egg, then chill it then, then microwave it.

OMG, tell us you are about to pull our other leg. You must be selling these things, is all I can imagine.

[eleny]

2. I make mine in the microwave using the two egg plastic holder

Here at high altitude some things can be iffy to cook. But I do like soft boiled and poached eggs. These are most easy to prepare here using a poaching setup where you can keep an eye on the progress. But the plastic microwave setup is also easy once I figured out that 1 minute and 5 to 10 seconds is the best timing.

There's nothing like a perfectly soft egg with a nicely cooked yoke.

[pengillian101]

3. There's nothing like a perfectly soft egg with a nicely cooked yoke.

Indeed, and it's quick and easily done. Three minutes, tops - start to finish!

75 minutes! LOL! It's a scam to sell crap.

[eleny]

4. It does seem like a long time to wait

My Volrath stainless cookware has an inserts and cups for poaching eggs in the large and small fry pans. It makes at least half a dozen eggs at a time in the large pan. Once the water boils, it's a matter of a few minutes to poached eggs.

[Warpy]

6. That's what my mother used back in the 50s

because they always came out a little more reliably than soft boiling them in the shell did, and my non cook of a mother would never have attempted the Julia Child method of sliding an egg into simmering water and attempting to consolidate the white while not disturbing the water enough to break the whole business apart.

Of course, my mother never did make the leap to the poached egg on bread crisped in butter and certainly not to spinach on the bottom and Hollandaise on top.

Still, the old aluminum egg poacher with little cups for each egg did manage to turn out reliably runny yolks, and I guess that's the point of the exercise.

[eleny]

8. I read that a tiny bit of vinegar in the water keeps the floating egg together

I didn't try it because I didn't want any vinegar flavor no matter how little. But I found that swirling the water helped.

[MajorChode]

10. I'm not sure if the vinegar really helps

I think some may have started doing it for taste and it just caught on. Restaurants that make poached eggs simply cull the ones that don't hold together. So there's a bit of waste, but eggs are cheap compared to what they are selling them.

[Sentath]

12. What a bizarre concept!

Have you ever seen what a little acid does to an egg in solution? Dissolves it!

My guess is that the vinegar washes away any bits of the egg that mix much with the water, leaving a mostly 'solid', if a little smaller, egg. The other option is that the egg mass serves as something for the dissolved egg to resolidify onto as is cooks.

[Arkansas Granny]

7. I do mine like I do hardboiled eggs. Put them in a pan of cold water,

bring them to a boil, cover the pan and turn off the heat. Soft boiled eggs take 3-4 minutes, depending on how soft/firm you like the white, and hard boiled eggs take 7-10 minutes, again, depending on personal preference. Stop the cooking by immersing in cold water.

[MajorChode]

9. That's how I've been doing them for decades

That method is certainly capable of good results, but timing is critical as is using the same pan, size and number of the eggs, amount of water, etc. So if you like precise results, it's important that you keep all the variables the same. Even at that you get uneven cooking. Essentially the whites of the egg will cook first and the yolk last and the yolk will cook from the outside with the center being a different texture. This can be a positive depending on how you like your eggs. If you like the yolks runny and the whites cooked more, this is a very good thing.

The sous vide method just produces different results which are unlike boiling. The doneness of the egg is completely the same throughout with the yolks having essentially the same firmness as the whites or even perhaps a little firmer. You can also fine tune how done you want the egg with very precise results which are easily repeatable and things like the size and number of eggs isn't critical. So I'm not sure you can really compare the results to a soft boiled egg, although this description is closer than most anything else. It's really more like eggs done in a whole new way.

[MajorChode]

5. When it comes to eggs, I prefer slower cooking methods

I did 6 as a test. The next time I'll do a dozen or so and keep them in the fridge so they are ready to go all week long. It takes me as much time to get them ready as it takes for an English muffin to toast.

[CTyankee]

11. Does anyone here still serve them in egg cups with their tops cut off?

With strips of buttered toast. My kids used to like "egg in a cup" cuz they could dip the strip of toast in the egg.

[Phentex]

15. I think my mom used shot glasses to hold them...

I'll have to ask her. I remember dipping the toast in. :)

I have never made these for my kids!

[struggle4progress]

13. Doesn't anybody still sell egg cookers like my parents had?

The thing would hold half a dozen eggs; it had a little measuring device in the hood to measure the amount of water you needed, depending on how well cooked you wanted the eggs; you added the water and turned it on; in a couple of minutes it turned off and you rinsed the eggs in cold water to cool them enough to stop the cooking; then you served them

I had "perfect" soft-boiled eggs as you describe several times a week for years growing up, and it didn't take more than a few minutes to do an egg or two for everybody in the family

[pengillian101]

14. Indeed!

I had "perfect" soft-boiled eggs as you describe several times a week for years growing up, and it didn't take more than a few minutes to do an egg or two for everybody in the family

[canetoad]

16. The Gluttony of Delicacy

"All she wants is a cup of tea properly made, or an egg properly boiled, or a slice of bread properly toasted. But she never finds any servant or any friend who can do these simple things “properly”—because her “properly” conceals an insatiable demand for the exact, and almost impossible, palatal pleasures which she imagines she remembers from the past; a past described by her as “the days when you could get good servants” but known to us as the days when her senses were more easily pleased and she had pleasures of other kinds which made her less dependent on those of the table."

.....CS Lewis The Screwtape Letters

[Phentex]

17. ...

eggcellent!

:thumbsup: