Friday, August 3, 2012

Singaporean half-cooked egg

The egg is one of the most versatile foods ever. There are many different types of eggs, but I'm talking about the number of different ways to prepare an egg:

hard boiled, soft boiled, scrambled, sunny side up, over easy, poached, coddled, 65 degree egg....

and those are just the ones where the egg is the only ingredient. If you add some more ingredients, you get

meringue, soufflĂ©, tamago, omelet, thousand year egg, tea egg... just to name a few.

So what's the point of my egg rant? One day, a server cracked what looked like a raw egg into my soup, and it was this half-cooked jiggly thing.... it was a revelation.

I don't know what this thing is called, but I've seen it in many Asian restaurants. I went ahead and titled it after what gave me the most correct hits on google, but I do believe my version is a little more solid than the Singaporean version.


I had to test out a few eggs to get the right timing for the recipe because it's dependent on the conductivity of your cooking container.

I cooked the egg in the blue square ceramic bowl in the background. I let the egg warm up to room temperature, and then I poured boiling water over it. I let it sit in the boiling water for 5 minutes while bubbling and making an "eeeeeeee!!" sound. Then I poured out half the water, and refilled it with more boiling water (from the same tea kettle without reboiling) and let it sit for another 5 minutes.

When you crack the egg, the inside comes out whole and cooked! It's perfect for soups. It's a bit more jiggly than poached eggs because you don't get that completely cooked exterior, but that's why it's superior in noodle soup!

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