A friend had gone out for lunch with poached eggs. At least they hadn’t just been poached eggs, they were on toast and there was everything under and on and around: smoked salmon, avocado, cherry tomatoes, lettuce leaves, capers, olives, all kinds of seeds and kernels and a nice sauce in which mustard and honey were added. tests were. She liked this dish so much that she wanted to recreate it at home. It didn’t seem very difficult and moreover she is a skilled cook, the kind of person who doesn’t turn her hand around for a five-course dinner for twelve people.
My girlfriend invited a friend – not me – to lunch, got all the necessary things in the house and prepared everything as best she could, so that in the end all she had to do was poach the eggs. But no matter how experienced she is as a cook, she just happened to never have done this job. She had read something about making a vortex in the pan of water and then breaking the eggs above it, so hoppetee, hope you’re lucky. It turned out, let me put it mildly, not quite what she had expected.
At that, my friend wisely decided she just needed to practice a few more times without hungry guests at her kitchen table. A week and two dozen eggs later, she called me with the words: “Jansje, you have to teach me how to poach eggs.” I explained my method to her, one that I in turn learned from a Portuguese neighbor, and reassured her that the decisive factor for success is the freshness of the eggs. As an egg ages, the egg white becomes weaker and fan out more quickly when poached. An egg that was laid three weeks ago can hardly be poached properly.
A few weeks later, my poaching apprentice called again. It went better, but she was still not completely satisfied with her eggs. I had to chuckle at her tenacity and promised I’d come over and do it together sometime. We hadn’t seen each other for way too long anyway and this was a perfect occasion. When I entered her cozy Brabant kitchen a few days later around lunchtime, everything was ready: the toast, smoked salmon, avocado, and so on. On the stove was a tall saucepan of bubbling water. Next to it a box of farm-fresh eggs from a nearby farmer. I took off my coat, washed my hands and said: “Do you also have a lower and wider pan?”
After transferring the boiling water to a lower pan and pouring in a generous splash of vinegar, I cracked the first egg over a teacup and slid it into the water in one swift motion. Using two tablespoons, I folded the egg white—which fanned out just a little bit because the egg was so fresh—around the yolk. “Now you,” I said, and my friend broke the second egg, slipped it into the water, and folded the egg white around the yolk. “Gosh”, she muttered in surprise, “and I just mess with that vortex. I didn’t know it was that simple.”
Indeed, it’s that simple. And this Easter weekend seems like an excellent time to put an end to that damned vortex doctrine, which only makes poaching eggs unnecessarily complicated. If you now provide fresh eggs, I will explain everything step by step again.