Out of Pod Experience

What method do you use to poach the eggs ?

It takes a bit of skill I feel, and no easy way to do it.

I guess when you age you just find egg whites too "plain" for your tastes...

But which came first ?

Lifehack: you can directly link to a specific time in youtube links if you put #t=XmYs after the link, where X is the minutes and Y the seconds.

so in your case: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VaxLcScfvmg#t=29m0s

this is blasphemy of the foulest order. we can't be friends anymore.

Not really that difficult, you just have to know the steps to make it the easiest for yourself.


1. Don't use cold eggs. You want them close to room temperature. Get them out of the freezer at least 15 minutes, preferably half an hour or longer before poaching them.

2. Don't use just water, add a bit of salt and vinegar to the water, and make sure you have a LOT of water (you want even as much as 3 liters of water for boiling two eggs at the same time, with a teaspoon or two of salt and three to five tablespoons of vinegar in it - pot should be even larger than that, never fill it more than 2/3 height).

3. Don't use strongly boiling water on a large flame, use water that's barely bubbling and just as little flame as needed to keep it going that way.

4. Don't break the eggs over the boiling water, open and place them in a small deep bowl first (not more than two or three times larger than the egg itself). If the egg white is too liquid, you might want to consider scrambling the egg instead of poaching it.

5. Give the boiling water a decent circular whirl before you drop the egg in (so you have a slight "rolling" motion on the egg white), enough to cause a fairly visible dimple in the center of the pot (but not a deep vortex, that speed will shred the egg apart). Slide the egg out of the bowl in between the edge of the pot and the center whirl, slightly closer to the center, from as close to the surface of the water as possible (to minimize splash and fragmentation).

6. Gently remove excess egg white that flaked off and floats on top. DO NOT STIR THE WATER NOR EGGS AFTER THAT. The eggs should drop towards the bottom of the pot. When they're almost done they'll start to lift up ever so slightly by themselves. They should be easy to scoop up.


TL;DR short version:
Lukewarm eggs with jelly eggwhites, salt and vinegar in the water, low flame, slight twirl to the water, gentle low drop from small bowl, slight cleanup, hands off and wait until they lift, scoop, done.

Wow, thanks for the extensive response.

I find the science behind cooking fascinating.

Radiolytic compounds?

You probably just don't like the eggs you eat. Find some other eggs.

Actually, that's probably true enough; I found I hated eggs a few years ago, then tried some different eggs, and then some others, and discovered i hated the ones that advertised Omega-3 and various other sorts of things. Plain old Large White Eggs in a paper carton is fine.

Not really.
Microwaves are not an ionizing radiation.
The electromagnetic spectrum goes: radio, microwaves, infrared, visible light, ultraviolet, x-ray, gamma ray.
Only "very high" ultraviolet has the capability of potentially being ionizing radiation, and of course everything past x-rays.
Microwaves are even lower on the spectrum than the radiated infrared heat of most cooking utensils.


Basically, the exact opposite,
Microwaving food actually PRESERVES more nutrients in the form in which they are originally present in the food than most common cooking methods.
It kills other stuff almost exclusively through dielectric heating of the contained fluids, and diffusion heating.
Heating would happen with any other cooking method too anyway.

...

The first problem is that we don't actually WANT all the nutrients in the form in which they already exist in the food (otherwise we'd just eat the damn things raw and not bother cooking at all).
So, in fact, while the food is generally safely cooked, some flavours do not "express" themselves in the way we learned to like them.

The second problem is that people sometimes use less than optimal receptacles for food when cooking it in the microwave.
You really DO NOT want to heat up something in a plastic dish, for instance (and other organic compounds), you should want to use ceramic or glass, something that DOES NOT heat up itself and has the potential to leak less than healthy stuff into your food.

The third problem is a two-part one : the frequency and power modulation method of the oven.
On the frequency side, most microwave ovens operate at around 2.5 GHz, but some go as low as under 1GHz. The higher the frequency, the heating effect becomes more efficient BUT LESS PENETRATIVE. This means most common ovens tend to heat up just the surface of the food
On the PWM side, most microwave ovens use pretty long on/off timers when modulating power, instead of using very short switching or even actually modulating the power fed into the microwave generator. This means that you get pretty long bursts at full power followed by absolutely nothing instead of a constant stream of intermediate power.
Which combo of frequency/PWM timing is best for the most tasty end result highly depends on what you are trying to cook in the first place.

So, basically, if you know what you want (and you can get it), also if you know what you have (and what it's actually good or less good for), you can do some pretty nifty and actually healthy things with it.
If you use "whatever" it is you have and essentially screw it up, of course you're going to get a significant chance of ending up with something unappetizing or even unhealthy.
That would also happen with more traditional cooking methods, but there the "bad" results are more readily apparent.