Poaching an egg is one of those essential cooking skills that everyone wants to have in their arsenal but rarely manages to master. While the process of poaching an egg seems pretty straightforward, you only need to make a tiny mistake or disregard a small detail, and everything will go sideways. Fortunately, celebrity chef Jamie Oliver decided to aid all of us poaching amateurs and let us in on his three methods that will give you a perfectly poached egg each time. So let’s check them out.
Basic Method with Fresh Eggs
According to Oliver, the best way to ensure you get a great poached egg is to use fresh eggs. Fresh eggs will have a stronger bond between yolk and egg whites and they hold their shape while older eggs easily break apart.
So, the first method calls for bringing a pot of water to a gentle simmer. You then crack an egg into a bowl and transfer it from a bowl to the pot. This will help you avoid a potential mess with a bad crack while ensuring that the egg “dives” the correct way into the water.
You then leave the egg in for three minutes or more, depending on your yolk preferences, before taking it out and digging in.
Method for Older Eggs
If you are stuck with an older egg, don’t worry, as Oliver has a method for that as well. The celebrity chef recommends spinning the water in the pot before dropping the egg. The spinning force causes the egg whites to wrap around the yolk and remain whole.
Safest Method
To avoid any risks, Oliver recommends using plastic wrap to poach your eggs. You just coat the plastic wrap with some olive oil, crack an egg into it and then seal it. This package goes into the pot, and you leave it on for three minutes before taking it out.
After it’s out, you just snip the top and reveal a perfectly poached and perfectly shaped egg.
You can check out how these methods look like in Jamie Oliver’s YouTube video below.
