Everyday food | This is how you cook the perfect egg

Boiled the perfect ripeness of the eggs is a matter of taste, but a clear favorite has been found at the Helsinki hotel’s breakfasts.

“Most people choose seven-minute eggs,” the kitchen manager at the hotel Lilla Roberts Karri Knaapila tells.

Very runny four-minute eggs are also popular. However, in the seven-minute cooking time, most people think the egg is just about perfect: the yolk is still very soft, but not too runny and far from dry.

Eggs can be cooked in many different ways: by adding them to boiling water, cold water or stewing. Regardless of the technique, the most essential for success is the cooking time, which must be precise if you are aiming for a certain degree of ripeness.

“The cooking time is always counted from when the water boils properly. The water must be boiling all the time.”

When cooking, it is important to consider whether smaller eggs or, for example, xl-sized eggs are used, Knaapila reminds.

Most of the eggs available in grocery stores are M and L size, i.e. weighing around 53–73 grams. However, sometimes eggs of different sizes can be in the same package. XL eggs weigh around 73-83 grams. The smallest s-sized eggs can be up to half the size of xl eggs.

For example, for the largest eggs, a cooking time of seven minutes can still leave the yolk much softer than when cooking a smaller egg.

We tested boiling an xl egg and a regular m size so that both were boiled for seven minutes, aiming for a soft but no longer runny yolk.

A big xl-sized egg was still clearly runny after seven minutes of cooking time. It needed one more minute, for a total of eight minutes of cooking time, until the yolk was no longer runny, but still soft. When cooking a much smaller egg, eight minutes or more cooking time will quickly make the yolk hard, dry and crumbly.

The following the general instructions apply to the cooking of M and L-sized eggs. If you add eggs to cold water, the heating time of the plate affects the final result.

Boiling water

• Loose: 4-5 minutes

• Soft: 6-7 minutes

• Hard: 8-10 minutes

Cold water (calculated from when the water starts to boil)

• Loose: 2-3 minutes

• Soft: 3-4 minutes

• Hard: 8-10 minutes

When the desired cooking time is full, the egg is immediately put in cold water or ice to stop the cooking. Keeping the boiled egg in cold water also makes peeling easier.

In brewing technology boiling water is poured into the pot over the eggs and the eggs are allowed to incubate in the cooling water for about 10-12 minutes. Another poaching method is to boil the eggs in boiling water for about a minute, after which the pot is removed from the hot plate. The eggs are left to incubate in hot water for 10–12 minutes.

Karri Knaapila also encourages learning how to make a poached egg. It’s not technically difficult.

“It’s a good side dish, which is perhaps a bit forgotten. A fried egg goes very well with bread.”

The sunken eggs salt and vinegar are needed in the preparation, because they speed up the cooking of the egg whites. One tablespoon of vinegar is enough for about a liter of water. When the water is bubbling, a spiral is spun in it with a ladle, in the middle of which the chicken egg is carefully dropped from the mug.

Karri Knaapila advises that the water should be bubbling, but it does not have to boil when the egg is poured to cook.

This is how you succeed

Recipe and pictures of cooking a poached egg: Glorian Ruoka ja viini magazine.