Rescues · TO POACH
Poached eggs spread into ragged clouds.
Why it happens
Water too agitated, or an older egg. The thin outer white loosens with age and disperses before it can set — straining it off first solves it entirely.
Recovering it
An underdone poached egg goes back into the water for thirty seconds and is genuinely recoverable. Overcooked is not. Tough poached chicken can be shredded and dressed, which disguises the texture well. The habit that prevents most poaching failures is simply keeping the pan off a full flame — bring the liquid up, then drop the heat right down before anything goes in.
The mechanism
Poaching runs at roughly 70-82°C — hot enough to cook protein, cool enough that almost no bubbles form. That range matters because it sits just above where most proteins set and well below where they contract hard and expel water. A chicken breast poached at 75°C stays tender across its whole thickness; the same breast in boiling water develops a tough outer layer long before the middle is safe. Eggs are the clearest case: white sets from about 63°C and yolk from about 65°C, so a narrow band of temperature is the entire difference between runny, soft and hard. The acid often added to poaching water for eggs works by encouraging the white proteins to coagulate faster, so they set before they can disperse — it is not about flavour and a very small amount does the job.
The full TO POACH lesson — how to tell, where to practise it, what it carries to.