is the restaurant technique in which eggs are
cracked into boiling water in a tall stockpot,
disappear into the depths, and — as if by
magic! — bob up to the surface again just
when they’re done: a handy way indeed to
keep track of many eggs being cooked at once.
The trick is the use of vinegar and salt (at
about ½ and 1 tablespoon respectively for
each quart of cooking water, 8 and 15g per
liter) and keeping the water at the boil. The
vinegar reacts with bicarbonate in the thin
white to form tiny buoyant bubbles of carbon
dioxide, which get trapped at the egg surface
as its proteins coagulate. The salt increases
the density of the cooking liquid just enough
that the egg and three minutes’ worth of
bubbles will float.
Fried Eggs The containerless fried egg is
even more prone to spreading than the
poached egg because it is heated only from
below, so its white is slower to coagulate.