soft-boiled eggs

The perfectly cooked egg exists, it's true! Unfortunately, the perfect home recipe does not (well unless you have an immersion circulator handy). You would think cooking an egg would be pretty easy. Put the egg in boiling water and cook. Not so quick!! There are enough variables to make even your most OCD friend lose his mind. How many eggs are you cooking, what temperature are your eggs, what's the radius of you pot, what quantity of water is in it, how hot does your stove burn, how cold is your tap water, what altitude are you at, how quickly do you cool your egg, and most importantly - what defines a perfectly cooked egg?!?

I cook a lot of eggs and I've gone through plenty of phases. Just within the last few months I've gone from wanting hard-boiled eggs, to poached eggs, then onto sunny side up, and now I have a constant craving for soft-boiled eggs. I won't get into all the specifics, but the challenge in cooking the perfect egg is that the whites and yolk set at different temperatures. In fact there are different proteins in the whites and they will each set at very different temperatures: anywhere between 140°F and 180°F degrees. Meanwhile the yolk begins to thicken at around 150°F and sets around 160°F. Tricky little bugger that egg huh?

Today I'm going to focus on soft-boiled eggs. The goal here is thicken but not set the yolks while you cook the whites until they're just set. In my opinion the best way to achieve this is to place your eggs in directly in boiling water. This will cook the exterior of the egg faster than the yolks, and yields the desired results. By contrast when I cook hard-boiled eggs, I start the eggs in cold water and bring the whole egg up to temperature (just like you would a boiled potato to achieve an evenly cooked interior). So for a soft-boiled egg, six minutes in boiling water seems to work perfectly for me. There is one thing to remember though. If you add too many cold eggs to your boiling water, your water temp will drop too much. So just use more water, cook fewer eggs at a time, or adjust your cooking time!

Today I paired two soft-boiled eggs with tomatoes, basil, salt, olive oil, and bread. A poor man's Caprese Salad... The texture of a six-minute egg approximates the mozzarella very well. The yolk mixed with the olive oil and basil makes a great sauce to mop up with bread. It's really a pretty clever combo if I may say so myself :)