I find so curious the response I got almost every time I talked to some French frien about poached eggs: “My grandmother cook them great!” Excuse me? Your grandmother? Curious response because when I was living in I considered them as something very difficult to cook and quite unusual (I never found one in a daily menu). Here, it turns out to be a grandmother’s speciality. I never saw any of my grandmothers to cook poached eggs. Confirmed also by all of my dad’s and my mom’s childhood. However, this is what is here, a grandma dish, because I know few people of my age who know how to make eggs like this.
For those who have asked theirselves, I must say yes, I talked a lot about poached eggs in the beginning of my stay in France. Why? Because it is one of the ingredients in one of the salads I’ll never get tired of. With bacon and croutons, it’s the Lyonnaise salad (guess what the next recipe will be? ;)). That salad encouraged me to learn how to cook poached eggs. That would be a way to have it again a lot of times, especially after leaving France. So until I really decided, lots of people listened to me regretting my cowardice in front of a poached egg everytime I asked for a Lyonnaise salad in a restaurant Lyon (and there were a lot). Well, look me now, when I really decided, not only I learned how to make poached eggs, but also, I found them a place for those weekends where you wake up late and having one of these eggs for breakfast makes you feel so good.
A poached egg, it’s not difficult to make at all, if four golden rules are followed to the dot. Well… I know that that is more rules than the ones needed to look after a gremlin, but an egg will never manipulate you to make you fail on poaching it. Conversely as what happens in the movie, where that guy is manipulated by the cute gremlins to make him to bend the rules. So, as that’s not going to happen, to make a poached egg, the rules you need to follow are these: use always fresh eggs; 2) never add salt to the cooking water (never! Because salty water prevents the egg white to propertly coagulate); 2) Add a little of vinegar (which has the opposite effect than salt and that’s just what we want) 3) never add the egg in boiling water (since bubbles would prevent the egg to be well formed), and 4) spin the water before adding the egg (for the white to wrap the egg and stay nice).
