Poached eggs

We went to Second Home in Eltham for our last meal out with our guests. Well they were getting on the plane late at night and I thought it would be a good idea to have a brunchy sort of meal in the early afternoon so that they wouldn't need anything before getting on the plane. Anyway i had a poached egg thing - on crumpets with spinach and a chilli relish. Now I don't really do poached eggs myself so I thought I would look into them.

My husband doesn't really like eggs at all - an omelette is the only way he will eat them, and I suspect that poached eggs might be his least favourite way of doing them - because it's the runny yolk that he doesn't like, and the runny yolk is sort of the point with a poached egg. I'm pretty sure that we had them when I was growing up, but how my mother cooked them I really can't remember. For if you Google poached eggs, what you get is a whole lot of sites claiming to have the correct way of doing it.

"Should the eggs be strained? Is a non-stick pan critical? And how big should it be? Is the addition of vinegar to the water necessary to help the whites coagulate? How hot should the water be? Should you make a whirlpool? How vigorous should the whirlpool be? How many seconds should you count—aloud—between when you stop actively whirlpooling and when the egg is lowered in? What is up and what is down!? Does God exist!?" Food 52

Felicity Cloake, as usual has the best summary of all the different ways of doing it - she seems to plump for the whirlpool method but whisking the water with a whisk rather than stirring vigorously with a wooden spoon, but she's quite taken by the gladwrap method too, although she doesn't include the microwave method as proposed by Kitchn, but she does include Delia's. The ones in the picture at the top of the page look pretty much perfect and are from The Perfect Table. Their method is slightly different from Felicity Cloake's as is Yotam Ottolenghi's, as described on the Food52 site. Then I also thought to look up what Heston Blumenthal does, because he seems to experiment with these sorts of dishes, and found this nice summary of his method on the Confessions of a Glutton blog. Yet another slight variation on a theme. It's actually amazing how many variations there are on cooking an egg that has been removed from its shell in hot water. I think my mother just cracked the egg into the water, which they all tell you not to do. It's yet another example of the ingenuity of cooks everywhere. Take one ingredient like an egg and you can come up with thousands of ways of cooking it - even if the only other component is hot water. So if you like poached eggs, try them all and see what you think, or make up your own version.

Oh - and just about the only two things they all agree on are that you should have as fresh an egg as possible - a stale egg just won't do. How do you know if it's fresh (if you don't have chickens that is)? Well if your uncracked egg sinks to the bottom of a bowl of water it's fresh, if it floats it's stale, indeed possibly dangerously stale and should be thrown out. Halfway and it's Ok but not fresh. The other thing they agree on is that you should drain your finished egg on a slotted spoon and even perhaps on a paper towel - though I'm not quite sure how you then get it off of the paper towel. Pick it up and turn it over I guess - though the egg might fall through the now damp paper. I don't think anyone told you how to do it.

So you've got your perfect poached egg. Now what to do with it? Well put it with anything else trendy for a start - avocado, asparagus, kale, beetroot - or anything non-trendy like potatoes or crumpets. Or just serve it on toast (sourdough of course) with some cracked black pepper. Here are a few pictorial suggestions.