Why it works: Vinegar and egg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 33% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 12,922 recipes. Both carry acetic acid, which smells sour, vinegar. The science ↓
Poached Eggs
Ingredients
Directions
Poach
Place a deep frying pan or low, wide saucepan with 2 quarts of water over the fire.
Add ½ teaspoon of salt and 1½ tablespoons of vinegar.
Once boiling, crack an egg and let it drop into the water.
Repeat for the remaining eggs.
Move the pan to the side of the stove to stop boiling.
When the egg whites are firm, carefully remove the eggs with a skimmer.
Serve
Cut the eggs into a round shape with a cake cutter.
Place the cut eggs on buttered toast.
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.
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Vinegar + eggtop 33% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together12,922 recipes
Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).
Vinegar and egg barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,922 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
- Eggs
- The whites set into a firm shell around the yolk when poached in hot water.
- Vinegar
- Acid helps the egg whites coagulate more tightly, keeping them neat in the water.
The step that matters
Moving the pan off the boil before adding the eggs... . Water that is boiling hard tears apart the delicate egg whites. Holding the water just below a rolling boil lets the whites set gently around the yolk.
“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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