breakfast blogger

We made some soft-boiled eggs a while back . . . I had almost forgotten how good they can be.

I don’t think I had my first soft-boiled egg until I was well into my twenties, but it was definitely worth the wait. I grew up in a traditonal Jewish Montreal home with some finicky parents, who were not boring, but they were set in their ways. Even though we had no soft-boiled eggs, no poached eggs, or even any real omelets, we had some great scrambles - salami and eggs being my all-time childhood favourite. I am now glad my parents were such finicky eaters, because it has left me such a wide range of foods to discover in my adulthood.

We get our eggs from a farm just outside of Montreal, as I try not to buy industrially produced eggs anymore: Chickens are animals - not machines. When I am out of eggs before farm day, I will go to the Jean-Talon market and buy eggs from an old guy who says he has “organic” eggs which are not certified - I haven’t yet fully investigated his claims, but I plan to. If I am too lazy to go al the way to the market, I often pick up some Burnbrae Farms “Free run” eggs at our neighbourhod grocery store.

Whenever I make soft-boiled eggs, I always use my ‘egg timer’, which I never really trust. It’s a fiberglass dome, shaped like half-an-egg, and you are supposed put it into the water when it is still cold and then start cooking your eggs. When the red color fades to the desired level of doneness, you take the eggs out. I don’t normally use these types of gadgets, but this one was a gift, so I use it, with a certain amount of distrust.

I always take my eggs out of the refrigerator as far in advance as possible, which is usually once we have decided that we want soft-boiled eggs. This is hopefully about 30 minutes before cooking, as I don’t want to shock the eggs and have them crack in the hot water. I fill a pot with water, add the eggs and the egg-timer, and then put it on the stove set to “high”.

Once a boil has been reached, I immediately turn down the heat to medium-high to keep the boil as gentle as possible, and wait about 3 minutes. In my opinion, the size, quality, and age of the eggs are all factors which may affect the cooking time. How can this little plastic dome know anything about my eggs? It can’t!

This said, I usually cook my eggs about 3 minutes. I have a 75% success rate, but I am satisfied with my margin of error because I am usually cooking for my lady and myself, and I will gladly eat any undercooked eggs while my lady will happily eat any overcooked ones. This is one of the reaosn I love her.

The best part about soft-boiled eggs is this little egg circumsizer I got as a Christmas gift a few years back, from the same people who gave me the egg-timer. I found this a funny gift seeing as I am Jewish and I got an egg-moyle to celebrate the birth of baby Jesus.

We enjoyed these with kamut toast points and some hunks of cheese.

Yummy.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 26th, 2007 at 11:08 am and is filed under Breakfasts, Montreal, Recipes, Spanky's Recipes, Spanky's Breakfasts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.