I’ve always wanted to cook eggs in my SousVide Supreme but I’ve never made them until tonight. There’ve been lots of aborted attempts because by the time I want to make them I’m too dang hungry, tired, or impatient to wait an hour for the eggs to cook. Yes, you read that right. It takes at least 45 minutes to an hour to sous vide an egg.
Why the hell would you wait that long to cook an egg when you can fry one up in a couple minutes? Well, a perfectly cooked soft boiled egg is delicious and the only “cooking” you have to do is just drop an egg into the water oven and wait an hour. It can’t get any simpler than that!
Cooking soft-boiled eggs properly the conventional way is super tricky – 30 seconds can make the difference between a nice runny yolk and a hard yolk. Plus, with kids, I just don’t have the time to be as vigilant about my cooking as I used to be. Er, yeah, it’s the kids’ fault…
What is the “perfect” temperature to sous vide an egg? That’s hard to say because it’s so subjective – some people like runnier yolks while others like them more custardy. After searching my cookbook library and the interwebs, I came up with three “perfect” temperatures that I’ll experiment with other the next few week:
- 142 F: recommended by cool chef geek J. Kenji Lopez-Alt at Serious Eats’ Food Lab
- 144.5 F: recommended by chef superstar Thomas Keller in his beautiful cookbook, Under Pressure: Cooking Sous Vide.
- 148 F: recommended by Douglas Baldwin, author of the super practical and indispensable reference Sous Vide For The Home Cook
Tonight, arbitrarily, I tried out 142 F.
Here’s what I did:
I filled and heated my Sous Vide Supreme to 142 F. When it was at the correct temperature, I carefully dropped in my eggs with a slotted spoon and left the eggs in the bath for an hour.
( J. Kenji Lopez Alt recommends a minimum of 45 minutes and up to 4 hours cooking time.)
I carefully removed an eggs from the bath with a slotted spoon…
…cracked it softly on the counter, and carefully removed part of the shell to reveal a hole of about 1 inch in diameter.
I carefully poured out the egg through the hole into a bowl…
…and gingerly transferred the fragile egg onto a bed of stir-fried kale and bacon. I seasoned the egg with salt and pepper and a drizzle of balsamic vinegar.
What’s my verdict? The eggs were a tad underdone for my taste because I like the whites more coagulated. Still, they were pretty tasty and so damned easy to make.
Next up, 144.5 F!
