We decided to try making poached eggs this morning for breakfast. We don’t have any of the poaching gadgets, just planned to swirl the boiling water and drop it in. The first one wasn’t perfect, probably dropped it from a little too high. The second one worked much better but we decided to “do a little research” and pulled some old cookbooks from the shelf.
We were looking at a Woman’s Day cookbook from 1966 and the first few recipes were for Abalone. We had no idea what abalone was and our curiosity took us down a rabbit hole. We have always enjoyed the research part of any project and have a love of learning we tired our best to instill in our children. Turns out it is not something we are likely to find at our local stores since it is only available in California. So why was it in this recipe book?
A quick web search uncovered that this very large sea snail was once available to all until around 1976 when they started to limit the amount that could be harvested per day. As the population of Abalone dropped due to over fishing the harvesting laws became more and more restrictive and eventually were not allowed to be shipped out of state. Now this “delicacy” is limited to parts of California and can only be fished by free diving, or something like that. If you want to learn more about abalone check out the article “Can the long lost abalone make a comeback in Californa?” from the LA Times. Just for fun we searched for a TV program or movie and quickly found a Deadliest Catch type episode about fishing for abalone off the southern coast of Australia. We watched the first episode and feeling proud of expanding our knowledge turned our focus back to the eggs.
The first thing in the egg world we came across was around shelling hard boiled eggs. It claimed that if you put a pin hole in the shell before you boiled them, the shell would come right off. So… we did that… and guess what? It worked! It had to be the easiest egg peel ever!
Make a small hole.
We used push pins.
Super easy to peel.
But I digress, back to poaching. One tip we found was around removing some of the “liquid” (part of the Albumen) from the egg before poaching by using a sieve. So back to the kitchen to see if it helped and I am happy to say we had excellent results.
