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Egg Poach

A single egg cooked in hot ghee or oil until the bottom is browned, served with pepper and sea salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Egg and ghee work together. They rank in the top 30% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 418 recipes. The science ↓

Egg Poach

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the egg

  1. Heat ghee or oil in a pan.

  2. Carefully pour the egg into the hot ghee or oil, keeping the yolk whole and centered.

  3. Trim the sides of the egg if necessary.

  4. Remove the egg when the bottom is browned, without flipping it.

Serve

  1. Serve with ground pepper and coarse sea salt.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Egg + gheetop 30% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together418 recipes
  2. Egg + peppertop 33% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together50,580 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  3. Ghee + peppertop 33% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together690 recipes

    Shared aroma: maltol (caramel, sweet).

Egg and pepper barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 50,580 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Egg
The white sets into a firm structure while the yolk stays soft and rich.
Ghee or oil
Conducts heat evenly and fries the underside, giving browning and a crisp edge.

The step that matters

Carefully pour the egg into the hot ghee or oil. Egg white proteins set almost on contact with hot fat. Pouring gently keeps the yolk centered and the white spreading evenly, so the edges do not spread thin or break apart.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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