This morning as I went through my twitter-feed while lying in bed (don’t judge) I ran across a tweet about a perfect poached egg (via @DrQuilter) and thought – why not?

So I favorited it because twitter doesn’t really have a “I might read this later” button and hitting “favorite” even if you’re not sure is the only thing you’ve got. This is annoying to those of us who value precision and accuracy (which are not the same thing, she said accurately) but I digress.

Later I got up and decided Saturday morning of a holiday weekend was a good time to go through a rather long list of “tweets-saved-for-later” and so I read the post about a perfect poached egg. It finished with this recipe:

If you’re going to poach an egg, and don’t want to spend 20 mins cleaning the pan here’s what to do:

• Get some microwaveable clingfilm
• Get a cup
• Push the cling film into the cup, and crack the egg into the cling film
• You should be able to tie the clingfilm around the top of the egg,
• Drop egg into boiling water, and poach normally, it’ll taste great, and you wont have to spend ages scrubbing cooked on egg of the damn pan.

Note: I desperately want to correct the typos in this, but in the interest of accuracy I have simply pasted it in. I felt you should know.

Now, I’ve never poached an egg so “poach normally” was not actually useful instruction. I asked the internet and got “4 minutes in boiling water” as an average answer, so decided it must be true (it was on the internet, after all).

[I feel at this moment you might think I’m a pathetic cook. This is not true – I’m quite a decent cook and make up great recipes all the time. I am not a traditional cook in that I learned all the normal techniques one might expect a cook to know. But I can take stuff that is sitting around and make a tasty meal out of it, and usually healthy too. Soups are a favorite thing to make and with the coming of fall I may post a couple of my favorites. I also once took third place at a local chili contest I definitely should have won, but I digress. Again.]

“Well,” I said to myself, “the man is wending his way back home on airplanes and you’ve got a day to do whatever you want even though you already know that means yardwork even though you don’t really really want to do that it has to get done but first maybe you should try this egg-poaching thing.”

I’m a bit rambling when I talk to myself. Don’t judge.

So I went downstairs and got out the required ingredients and put a pot of water on to boil. Boiling water takes a while. I am not that patient, but I persevered. In the meantime I assembled the egg-in-clingwrap:

step 1: put the clingwrap in a bowl

step 2: crack egg into bowl-lined-with-clingwrap

Step 3: figure out how to “tie” the clingwrap around the egg

Gosh, doesn’t that look yummy?

So, I have an egg wrapped up in clingwrap…. And finally the pot of water boils. Woohoo! It’s time to POACH!

Step 4: drop clingwrapped egg into boiling water

Step 5: wait

I set the timer for four minutes. Four minutes is a surprisingly long time to stare at a clingwrapped egg in boiling water (yes yes, I took it off the boil briefly for the photo above). I made toast. I made coffee. I wandered outside and looked for frogs (spotted Uptown Frog, if you wondered). I came back in and watched the timer count down to zero.

Gosh, doesn’t that look yummy?

I set the thing onto a towel briefly to get the excess water off and then onto my plate, where I unwrapped my egg. If I never deal with hot wet clingwrap again, I’ll be fine with that. Also, perhaps some non-stick spray would have been a good idea. I will probably never know, because I am fairly certain I’m not doing this again.

uhm. Breakfast is served?

I got my toast and cut into my egg. Okay, that was pretty cool. Even though I have no doubt that Masterchef would be appalled at the technique, they could definitely not fault the yolk.

Yes. Breakfast is served.

Verdict: this egg tasted great. However, the trouble I went to was not worth the final product and I don’t think I will bother doing it again especially since I have a foolproof way to do eggs-over-easy without actually having to ever flip the egg (I will document this soon because I know you are dying to hear it now). It is much faster and also gets me the lovely yolk to go with my toast, which is all I really want anyway. Also, I make a great omelet. That’s not just my opinion. That’s the opinion of the people who have eaten my omelets. Perhaps I will share that someday too.

Do you have an easy and tasty egg recipe? Share it in the comments!