Here's Why Your Poached Eggs Are Never As Good As A Restaurant's

For all the home chefs out there, there's hardly a more frustrating experience than not being able to make something as delicious as what you can get from a good restaurant. There's always a secret or a trick, from Anthony Bourdain praising shallots for making his restaurant's food taste better to seasoning salads on top of dressing them.

Among the many foods that always seem to taste better at restaurants are poached eggs, a simple food in theory yet still among the hardest methods for cooking eggs. The difficulty comes from the technique mastery required to successfully poach eggs, with different tips and tricks such as adding a splash of vinegar or straining the eggs first to try and make it easier.

Or you can forget about your worries and your strife and go with the cooking method some restaurants use to remove pretty much all difficulty: sous vide cooking the eggs still in their shell. It's an unconventional way to poach an egg, but this way you can essentially set and forget the eggs, giving you more time to master that finicky hollandaise sauce.

To make a restaurant-quality sous vide poached egg, start by creating your sous vide water bath, which is as simple as filling a pot, bucket, or other small container with water and attaching your sous vide to it at your chosen temperature. The temperature is integral for sous vide poaching an egg; too low and your egg won't set right, too high and you'll wind up hard boiling it instead.

A good temperature to start at is 146 degrees Fahrenheit because at this temp you can leave your egg in the sous vide for hours, cracking it open wherever you're ready. If you're short on time (or just don't want to wait), you can also try cooking at 167 degrees Fahrenheit for 13 minutes. If you crack your egg open and it's not 100% done, you can give it a traditional poach for about a minute to finish it off.