All Sous Vide Egg Cooking Methods, Ranked
The main advantage of sous vide cooking is controllability . A constant temperature water bath greatly reduces the danger of food digestion, making it an ideal method for preparing eggs, a humble food that can be excellent if cooked right, but a rubbery and sulphurous smell if overdosed.
Choosing the cooking time and temperature is not an easy task. Fortunately, Anova’s Accurate Cooker comes with an app that contains a variety of recipes . The Anova app alone has over half a dozen different ways to cook an egg, all with very specific times, temperatures and promises. Perfectly cooked eggs are the stars of my favorite breakfasts and brunches, so I really wanted to try eggs in sous vide, but how convenient is it to cook eggs this way and does it really taste much better? To find out, we cooked over two dozen sous vide eggs and rated them from grade A to rotten.
Incredible Edible Eggs
Sous-video preparation is not the fastest, but stable . Heating the water can take anywhere from half an hour to a full hour, depending on the size of your bath, which requires a long wait. The following two methods for preparing eggs are definitely worth your time.
Ideal poaching (61.7 ℃ 00 h 45 min). Author: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt.
The only correct poached egg recipe I found was a Food Lab recipe , and honestly, it’s the only one you need. You start cooking the eggs at 143 ℉ / 62 ℃ for 45 minutes, which gives you a perfectly boiled soft-boiled egg. Then you gently crack it open, place it in a bowl, and gently scoop it out with a slotted spoon, allowing the loose, watery squirrel to fall off. To finish, bring the pot of water to a simmer, then reduce heat until bubbles stop forming. Serve the egg there for a minute to finish and drain.
I doubted how important this last step would be, but after trying it, I can confidently say that this extra effort turns an already delicious mild-cooked egg into a beautiful restaurant-quality poached egg that demands to be Benedict’d. (I didn’t get that far with mine; I just ate it with a little salt.) Since the egg is already cooked, it sticks together and forms a smooth crust much better than raw (yes). This makes one pretty egg.
Yes, it takes a little longer than a soft-boiled egg (which we’ll talk about a little later) and I wouldn’t do it every day, but if you want to make a bunch of eggs for a group brunch? This is the way. You can cook a dozen sous vide at a time (even the day before) and then finish them in this barely boiling water right before serving them on a perfectly toasted English muffin. Plus they look very pretty.
Recipe Rating: Making Egg Brunch
Scrambled eggs in a bag
I never thought I’d say this, but I love scrambled eggs in my bag. There are two different scrambling recipes in the Anova app. One is just eggs cooked in a bag and stirred from time to time, and the other is eggs with milk, cream and ghee cooked in a bag that is stirred from time to time. Both are good, but one is exceptional. (Spoiler: the one with the cream and butter.)
Scrambled Eggs Sous Vide (73.9 ℃ 00:30, stir gently every 10 minutes) Emily Farris and Jeff Akin (Anova App)
With no milk, butter, or anything other than salt and pepper, these were some of the most creamy, cream-free eggs I’ve ever eaten, and they had a big fluffy curd cheese that melted in my mouth. The only thing they lacked was the taste of butter, which I usually use to cook my eggs, but this “problem” was solved with the following recipe.
Recipe Rating: Simple Egg Checkered
Scrambled Eggs Heston’s Sous Vide (75 ℃ 00h15m) by Christina Wiley (Anova app)
This recipe, inspired by Heston Blumenthal, is usually topped with brown butter, but I wanted to try them myself so the butter doesn’t distract from the taste of the eggs. In addition, some rich additives are already at work here. To make them for one person, beat three eggs along with a tablespoon of cream, whole milk, and ghee. Season with salt and pepper to taste and pour it all into a bag. Place the bag in a water bath for fifteen minutes, removing every five minutes to shake gently.
The other scramble was good , but those eggs were delicious. “Custard” is the word I muttered to myself. These smooth, velvety scrambled eggs swayed pleasantly, and each bite was soaked with a rich, delicious yolk flavor.
Recipe Rating: Egg Static Clap
Cooking them softly
There are definitely several ways to softly cook an egg, and choosing the “best” one depends on your preference. The beauty of gently cooking an egg using the sous vide mode is that you will always get roughly the same results. (Differences can arise due to differences in egg size, whether it is dipping them directly from the refrigerator or warming them to room temperature first, etc.). good time. Even with the shortest cooking time (13 minutes), heating the water to temperature can take from half an hour to a full hour, depending on the size of your cookware. So if you want soft cooked eggs now the more traditional method is probably the way to go.
In this case, eggs cooked on a “sous-kind”, delicious, and there are three different ways to do this.
Egg Sous Vide (75 ℃ 00h13m) recipe by Christina Wiley (Anova app)
The great thing about this egg is that both the egg and the white had the same creamy consistency. In any case, the yolk was a little harder than the white.
Soft Boiled Egg Sous Vide (63.3 ℃ 00 h 45 min) recipe by Emily Farris and Jeff Akin (Anova app)
If you are a fan of the liquid egg through and through, then this is the egg for you. The white was just opaque and solidified, but had no real shape to speak of, and could easily flow with the yolk.
Food Lab Sous Vide Soft Boiled Egg (boiled for 3 minutes, then cooked at 61.7 ℃ 00 h 45 min) recipe by J. Kenji Lopez Alt.
Since they were cooked just a couple of degrees apart, it’s logical to assume that this egg was quite comparable to the one above. The main difference is that this egg is boiled for three minutes and then poured over with ice water to keep it in shape and make it easier to peel off. This is a good theory, but I tried it with a few eggs and they just didn’t clean up well.
It did hold its shape a little better and the white was a little harder as you can see in the photo below (pre-boiled and beaten egg on the left, just sous vided on the right):
All three were good soft-cooked eggs, but I think the former was my personal favorite; the texture was less fluid and more uniform throughout the egg. Again, this is a matter of personal preference. However, I am still not sure if I will regularly cook eggs this way, as I can cook the soft egg that suits me with a little boiling water. The results are not as reproducible as with sous vide, but it is much faster and I need it to be fast in the morning. Long story short: while these eggs were good, they didn’t change lives, and I’m not going to change my morning routine to give me an extra 45 minutes to adjust.
Recipe rating (for all three 🙂 Not worth the effort.
Not worth your (egg) time (r)
There are also recipes that are just silly. Given the fact that each of the recipes below take an hour to prepare (excluding water heating time), you might think the results would be something really special. This is not the case and I recommend skipping them.
Sous Vide Yolk (62 ℃, 01h00m) by Christina Wiley (Anova app)
The very first recipe I tried was sous vide egg yolk. According to the description, the yolk becomes “thicker after cooking for an hour at 62 ℃,” making it “ideal for spreading on crispy strips of bacon and bread.” The best part of the egg is the yolk, so that sounded promising. The picture looked good too.
Unfortunately, in reality, everything turned out to be much less tasty. I put the egg in the bag and it did go through the cooking process, but the moment I opened the bag, the yolk flew all over the place. Unlike the promised recipe, it hasn’t hardened at all. After an hour of waiting, this was quite a disappointment.
Recipe Rating: Egg Peeling Frustration
Sous Vide Hard Boiled Eggs (76.7 ℃ 01 hr 00 min) by Emily Farris and Jeff Akin (Anova app)
Let’s be honest: A hard-boiled egg doesn’t require finesse or precise timing than a soft-boiled egg. This is a fairly simple process: boil water, put eggs in boiling water, wait ten minutes, put in ice water. Not only does this method give me good results in terms of taste, but it is generally quite easy to cleanse. Basically, sous-video cooking an egg is a bit like using a tap to crush a fly, and the cooking time (not counting the time it takes for the water to warm up) is an hour .
But in case I missed out on a mind-blowing hard-boiled egg, I tried it anyway. As you can see in the picture above, it didn’t peel well, but was definitely “hard boiled.”
It tasted (you guessed it) like a hard-boiled egg. The white was perhaps a little softer and just a touch less elastic than a “normal” hard boiled egg and the yolk undigested, but I wouldn’t say it was much better than a traditionally boiled egg and took four times as long …
Recipe rating: Why do this with an egg?
Choose your own egg production facility
Let’s say you are very picky about your eggs and have exact texture specifications that must be met. Maybe the gentle cook is too runny and you like the fondant yolk. You can lengthen the cooking time as Kenji explains here , or you can try this nifty calculator from ChefSteps . To use the calculator, you select the white and yolk that you like visually. I went with this:
Then the calculator will give you the cooking time and temperature (I had 70 ℃ for 22 minutes) and send you on the road.
I cooked the egg to their specifications, and although the white did not hold its shape like in the picture, it was quite firm and the yolk texture was excellent.
Of course, there are some limitations. The calculator will show you the cooking time for an egg with a liquid egg white and a very hard yolk, but that would be a ridiculous cooking time (07h39m). (This could also result in a very messy egg.)
Sous vide eggs is all they hack?
There are two types of eggs that I will cook again with my Anova – boiled eggs and scrambled eggs (frankly, with cream and butter). The poached eggs were so lovely that I would never have to go out for eggs Benedict again (although I will because the bottomless mimosas) and the scrambled eggs were so velvety and delicious that I was tempted to throw my frying pan away (I won Though, I need it for other things).
But if I just need a quick-boiled soft-boiled egg, I won’t carry the sous vide machine and its accompanying water tub, and I definitely won’t use it for hard-boiled eggs; A hard-boiled egg can only be that good, and it just won’t be significantly improved by an hour’s constant temperature water bath. (You should also be aware that if your sous vide runs almost continuously for three days in a small kitchen, the windows and exterior walls will drip off, so be aware of the humidification effect.)
Everything, yolks.