hard boiled

I don’t even like egg but since she’s been on my case I am physically craving the protein.

She tells me I am wrong for doing it my way, tried and trusted for twenty years.

So I watch and see what happens as she shows me the superior technique.


 
First, you fill the pan with more water so it takes longer to cook, uses more natural resources, so that “the egg cooks properly all the way through”. I find this amusing given that the egg rolls when you use less water due to the bubbles forming either side of it. Can you tell I am from a desert culture?

Then she adds a splash of vinegar to the water so that if the egg should crack, it will seal itself before any white leaks out into the water. Vinegar has literally hundreds of uses, I tell her about when I was a kid I would soak a boiled egg in vinegar so the shell goes soft, then push it into a bottle with a neck narrower than the egg, so it hardens again inside like a ship in the bottle. My mam used to tell me off for doing that so I gave up on it. I ask her how much the vinegar cost.

Then I thank her for explaining the difference between a poached egg and a poached egg in a cup, because of all the methods of cooking eggs I have encountered nobody ever told me what its called when you crack an egg directly into boiling water, probably because nobody I ever knew cooks eggs that way. It turns out this this is a poached egg and what I thought was called a poached egg is actually called a poached egg in a cup, which really should be called a steamed egg in a cup since it’s a different technique to boiling without a shell.