I can do it the exact same way: 1:15 for one egg and it’s perfect.
except if the yolk explodes when I go to dip a corner of my toast into it and tiny bits of yolk go everywhere. SAD. :rolleyes:
breaking the yolk before I cook it works, but I’d rather not. why does it explode sometimes and sometimes not? sounds like a General Question to me.
The yolk sometimes explodes even if you pierce it?
I can’t see your eggs from here, but I would hazard a guess what’s happening is that a cooked piece of yolk blocks the hole you pierced in the yolk membrane, then it’s the same as if you hadn’t pierced it at all.
Either that or pixies.
One of the tests for door safety on m’wave ovens used to be to put a raw whole egg in and explode it. The oven was scrap after that. I think there is a warning in the instructions about cooking whole eggs.
This seems to me to be a General Question. Please direct your answers to this. If you want to give your favorite recipe for Eggs Benedict please start a new thread in Cafe Society.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
Microwaves heat unevenly. This is why most have turntables so that the food rotates between the cold and hot spots and most of it is heated.
Sometimes the yolk is cooked in a hot spot and is boiling and other times it is not and does not get that hot.
There’s also an effect of heating water past the boiling point, so that the moment it’s touched the whole container or food item boils violently. Sounds a bit like that, here.
Sometimes the process of cracking the egg and putting it in the water will create enough micro holes to prevent explosion. But not always. SO:
Pierce the yolk with a toothpick. Exploding problem solved. My eggs don’t leak their yolk after this procedure either.
My recipe for poached egg in micro:
a dash of vinegar in about 2 oz of water in a ceramic cup.
Microwave it until it boils
crack egg into it after boiling has stopped, pierce egg yolk with toothpick.
cover cup with saran wrap, pierce wrap with toothpick 3 or 4 times
microwave on medium for 51 seconds (up to 54 seconds for big eggs, 48 seconds for small ones)
Remove egg with slotted spoon, drain and serve.
Isn’t it honestly a lot easier to just do it in a pan?
Not for me. Takes 4 minutes, tops. Usually less. And as it’s cooking, I’m getting the English muffin, sausage, cheese and onion ready along with the marmite and butter and hot sauce for the poached egg sandwich. ETA also tomato.
shrug So many microwave, slow cooker and other “alternate” cooking methods seem like so much hassle compared to the basic ways. I can make myself three over easy on top of diced jalapenos, with toast, in a couple of minutes. One pan to wash out, and nothing explodes.
NOT thread pooping, here. But you’ve got more steps there than i have for some whole dinners. 
Only because I’m adding steps like:
put vinegar in cup
Poke with toothpick
It’s really quite simple to me. I cook plenty of stuff on the stovetop, both simple and elaborate. I just find this enormously more convenient than poaching on the stovetop. I’ve done it both ways.
Only if you leave them in the shell and try to cook them. Even then, it can be done safely with a special utensil:
The top is lined with metal that deflects the microwaves away from the eggs. They’re steamed by water underneath them. Four eggs take 10 minutes at half power and come out nicely hard-boiled.
I’m going to try the poking with a toothpick, thanks Doc what is the point of the vinegar? because I just cracked an egg into a bowl, covered it with just water, and 1:15, done.
wish I had a video of me when it exploded, I was pretty surprised. :rolleyes:
Emphasis mine.
We’re talking about poached eggs, here.
Now, I do them on the stove myself, and it’s pretty easy and you can do a big batch, but it takes a good 5-10 minutes for the water to boil up, and then about another 3 to cook them. Only trick I’ve got is to break the eggs into a strainer or colander so the watery whites get left behind and only the thicker whites remain. Oh, and a tablespoon or two of vinegar in the cooking water. No swirling or anything like that, just slide them one by one into the water from a shallow bowl. Picture-perfect poached eggs.
But, no it’s not faster than the microwave method (which I haven’t had any luck with, unfortunately. Or at least it doesn’t produce the kind of poached eggs I want.)
The vinegar is supposed to help the whites set faster and keep them from spreading too much in the traditional stovetop method. (And it’s not even really necessary.) I don’t see it really helping much in the microwave recipes, though, as you have the egg white contained and that’s not an issue.
I do that all the time. But I have to watch out for the kitchen game wardens.
I know. I meant to include them more clearly but I’m on a tablet with a cranky glass keyboard, so composition is slow. I don’t want to be seen as TSing since the thread is about microwave poaching, but I have never found microwaves and eggs to be a good combination - there’s always some tradeoff in the outcome. A few more minutes to use a simpler and more consistent method is a fair choice, to me.
Keeps the egg white together. Otherwise, depending on the mineral content of the water, it can be feathery and dispersed and break apart.
if you use a very small cup, you may not need vinegar, but I do like to have the cohesiveness of my egg white assured.
I’m generally skeptical of microwaves except for defrosting. So today I tried QtM’s procedure verbatim. Worked perfectly and was less fussy in the doing than in the reading.
Emboldened by my early success with one egg I bravely branched out and tried two eggs in one bowl.
In the spirit of giving back to the community I found that for two eggs a bit more water, around 3 oz, and a bit more time, around 80 seconds, came out nicely: white almost entirely solidified, yolk almost entirely liquid. Beginner’s luck made a hole in one.
In both tries the white mostly stayed together but I still lost 5-10% to the egg drop soup effect. Next time I’ll try a bit more vinegar to see if that helps the cohesion without trashing the flavor.
It may go against your sense of frugality and not wasting one bit of the egg but, seriously, try cracking the eggs into a strainer to get the loose/stringy egg whites out, retaining only the egg white with structural integrity. I don’t know how it works in the microwave, but the results are beautiful on the stove.