Poach Your Scrambled Eggs For A New Twist On Breakfast

You might think there are only a few ways to cook eggs: fried, boiled, scrambled, and poached. Well, leave it to a chef to come up with yet another option — enter the poached scrambled egg, invented by Daniel Patterson circa 2006. Patterson, who ran the Bay Area restaurant Coi until the pandemic (it closed for good in 2022), was dinking around in the kitchen making breakfast but didn't have his go-to frying pan. So he decided to pour beaten eggs into a pot of boiling water, put a lid on it, and poach them for 40 seconds or so. He later repeated the experiment at his restaurant. It seems to have caught on in egg circles (or ovoids). Nelson Serrano-Bahri, American Egg Board director of innovation, is familiar with the technique.

Serrano-Bahri tells Mashed in an interview that you can't just dump the eggs into the water. Instead, you should "give that water some movement" first. He compares it to making egg drop soup. Swirling the water into a vortex, like you do when making standard poached eggs, will hopefully keep the food from separating into strands like it does in the soup. He also suggests using the blender (either a hand or a stand one) to beat them first, telling us, "This will create a very delicate texture." On the other hand, he says insufficient whisking will result in rubbery whites. The one thing the eggs won't be, however, is dry — a strainer is necessary to drain the excess water when scooping them out of the pot.

Nelson Serrano-Bahri also advises that you don't poach plain scrambled eggs, but add a little dairy to the mixture. While some cooks feel that adding liquid to scrambled eggs dilutes the flavor and makes the texture rubbery, others disagree. Serrano-Bahri is clearly in the latter camp. The addition of milk, cream, or sour cream, in his opinion, "helps maintain the eggs' lightness while ensuring they cook evenly and softly in the water."

You may also want to add some salt and pepper, since no matter how airy your eggs are, they won't taste great with no seasoning. (Some cooks salt the water, but this means you'll just be pouring most of the salt down the drain.) Poached scrambled eggs could probably benefit from some sort of garnish, as well. In one episode of "The Real Housewives of New York City," cast member Dorinda Medley cooked eggs using this method, and most of the commenters on an r/realhousewives Reddit thread felt that the unadorned eggs didn't look particularly tasty (spoiled cottage cheese and cat vomit were a few of the comparisons). A layer of snipped chives or grated cheese, however, might have made those poached scrambled eggs look a lot more appetizing.