Eggs cooked sous vide at 62.5 C for 45 minutes.
I HAVE a confession to make: I always quail when cooking eggs (pardon the pun).
It is something I have not learned by rote.
Even when I was a kid, as simple as cracking eggs was a task I would avoid doing—when it was my turn to crack and cook eggs, I would skedaddle and pretend to do something else, somewhere.
There must be something about eggs—maybe it’s life-bearing delicacy that is too much for me to handle—that makes me cower.
A few days ago, my partner, Enrico, entreated me to cook sunny-side-up eggs for his breakfast, and he specifically mentioned he wanted his yolk done “malasado,” or medium rare.
No one at home could cook eggs the way Enrico wanted them, except he himself, I thought. But I could try. If it was another morning when my confidence level had taken a nosedive, I would just scuttle and drive to the nearest McDonalds to order a breakfast meal. I have always felt inadequate when cooking eggs.
If my poached egg would not hold shape or if the yolk on my sunny-side-up would be too chewy and dry and powdery, I’d consider the failure ineffable, irreparable.
But life has a way of poking fun at you. At me, at least. My first cooking class, at MasterClass with Chef Gordon Ramsay, was breakfast, and it was all about eggs! It took me more than a dozen tries—and more than a dozen eggs—to finally produce a decent restaurant-grade poached egg.
When I went to a formal culinary school (ISCAHM Cebu), I heaved a huge sigh of relief when it was announced on our first day of classes that breakfast would be pushed to seven weeks later.
That meant I had enough time to master cooking eggs in my kitchen, lest I would find myself having eggs on my face at school. Cooking eggs, to me, has been like walking on eggshells, all my life.
Until I learned about Arpege’s Allain Passard’s Egg Chaud Froid, which inspired Manresa’s David Kinch’s Farm Egg with Coriander, which inspired Chef James Syhabout’s signature egg dish (the 65C egg yolk with onion puree, dates and chives).
That egged me on to make my own signature egg dish one day. Until I learned cooking eggs sous vide. Well, the more apt term is slow-cooking eggs (because the eggs don’t need to be vacuum-sealed) in a water bath under controlled temperature using the immersion circulator, which, by now, has become the most overused cooking tool I have in my kitchen. Timing and temperature, like always, are the critical factors to achieve the right doneness, consistency and texture of our eggs.
It doesn’t matter now how we want eggs cooked—scrambled, or rolled up in omelet, soft boiled or poached, fried over easy or sunny side up. Cooking them properly is more confounding.
Not until, French food chemist, Herve This (say, Tiss) discovered that eggs cooked slowly at 65C at prolonged time would result in consistently smooth and custardy egg whites, and soft yolks that are not runny.
It seemed it was the perfect doneness for eggs that chefs picked up the technique and started serving the 65C egg in upscale restaurants around the world.
Other chefs have their own favorite cooking temperature, say 63 C or 64.4 C. Another food scientist, Cesar Vega, argued, 6 years ago, that various time and temperature combinations in cooking eggs would yield varying effects on the eggs, as far as viscosity is concerned.
He offered chefs qualitative comparisons of egg viscosities based on temperatures and cooking times.
In Modernist Cooking book, which I often use, they have a table of predictive time and temperature combination to correspond to a specific desired doneness of eggs, say for poached eggs, cooking at 61 C for 45-60 minutes for soft whites, 63 C for medium-set whites, or 64.4 C for firm-set whites over 45- to 60-minute cooking time.
With the sous vide technique, cooking eggs—and everything else, for that matter—is now simpler, easier, and less stressful, with results that are more predictable.
It has solved my egg problem, and for certain, made me look at eggs in a new light.