Eggs are one of my favorite foods to eat, but one of my least favorite to cook. Or, more accurately, they’re one of my least favorite foods to cook for work. Throwing an egg in a pan for breakfast is easy, and if I overcook it a smidge, I’m not going to care too much. But when you’re developing recipes and guides for eggs, things start to get tricky.
As we explain in our new egg guide, each part of an egg — yolk, tight white, and loose white — cooks differently:
“Because of varying concentrations of different types of proteins within each of an egg’s three constituent parts, each of those parts behaves slightly differently when heated. Tight whites will begin to set first, though they don’t become fully firm until a relatively high temperature. Loose whites remain watery until they reach high temperatures, and yolks fall in the middle, gelling softy at moderate temperatures and getting firmer and firmer the more you heat them.”
This poses problems for sous vide cooking, since a sous vide set up is really good at holding one consistent temperature, but isn’t very good at accommodating foods that may need to see different levels of heat at different times (aka eggs). We work around this with tricks like straining off the loose whites after cooking or by pre-boiling the eggs for a couple of minutes, but the most consistent way to ensure a perfectly cooked egg is to pay close attention to the cooking time.
Which… is something we often say you can basically ignore when cooking sous vide.
With foods like steak or chicken breast, it’s true that you have a relatively long window of time in which you need to remove the food from the sous vide water bath before it overcooks. When you’re cooking eggs, though, even a bit of additional cooking time can be detrimental to the final result — AND the egg’s size, age, and starting temperature can all alter the amount of time they need to cook.
Each of these problems is exacerbated when you work on egg recipes that don’t involve sous vide. Introduce the Anova Precision™ Oven and you’ve got to pay even closer attention.
And this is why it’s hard to develop egg recipes. Even if you call for large eggs straight from the refrigerator, there’s enough variation in egg age and in what refrigerator temperature even means that home cooks will see inconsistent results. This is true even in well-tested recipes and guides (like ours).
Is that to say all hope is lost? No, but be prepared to really dial in your preferences when you use our guides. And also please don’t ask me to develop any more egg content.