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Monday, August 06, 2007

Poaching Woes

No, this isn't a post about hunting endangered species.

FavoriteBoy and I made Eggs Benedict on Saturday for a nice, leisurely brunch. Eggs Benedict is a lovely meal - simple to prepare for two - or for a crowd.

HAH! Actually, Eggs Benedict is one of the few meals in the world for which I'd generally rather go out to a restaurant than prepare it myself. It's not just the egg-poaching, the canadian bacon-browning, the muffin-toasting, or even the hollandaise sauce-making. It's actually the dreadful, horrible, tear-your-hair-out saucepan-cleanup that really gets to me. Maybe I'm doing something wrong, but my poaching pot always becomes polluted and is a positive pain to, um, wash. (Okay, I'm done with the alliteration.) Saturday's pot has been sitting in my sink soaking for several days now, and tonight I finally got it clean - but the soaking, Bar Keeper's Friend, and elbow grease were all to no avail; I finally had to use a Brillo pad on my poor, beautiful stainless steel saucepan.

Seeking an answer to my clean-up dilemma, I did a few google searches. Of course, there are hundreds of sites telling you how to poach an egg (and almost as many different ways to do it), but none that I could find devoted to cleaning up the blasted pan.

In the course of my search, however, I did come across a very humorous site about poached eggs: B3TA: HOW TO POACH AN EGG. Complete with photographs, this site guides you through several attempts using a variety of different methods, including but not limited to "The Vortex Method." (If that's not enough to make you check out the link, what if I tell you that the author of the site is British and uses phrases like "bloody revolting"?) The top-rated method in the end involves wrapping the egg in plastic wrap before submerging it in the water, which I suppose would take care of the clean-up issue altogether - I'm just not sure how I feel about boiling plastic wrap in water and then eating the result.

2 comments:

  1. Anonymous12:37 AM

    Sarah:

    I love eggs benedict, but long ago gave up the poached egg. Now I fry them over easy. Much easier and it tastes almost the same. Plus cleanup is much easier. Try it! :)

    Aunt Susan

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  2. Anonymous12:28 PM

    Sorry to hear about your poaching woes. Gregg made simple scrambled eggs for breakfast this morning and I later found our brand new stainless steel pan covered with hardened egg. It appears it will take until our first anniversary to come completely clean!

    Let me know if you find anything magic to clean them with.

    -Cara

    P.S. We would like to hang out with you guys sometime...I'll give you a ring soon :)

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