How To Prevent Your Sous Vide Eggs From Cracking

If you're someone who likes eggs, you probably have your favorite way of preparing them. Maybe you like them scrambled — like 36% of Americans, according to a YouGov survey – or maybe you go crazy for a runny sunny-side-up yolk. Maybe you prefer them fried over medium on a breakfast sandwich, or maybe you love them hard-boiled, with a pinch of salt. However, if you've never tried cooking your eggs sous vide, you're missing out on a delicious treat.

Sous vide is a popular culinary method that slowly cooks your food via a water bath. You can use it to prepare almost everything: meat, veggies, desserts like creme brulee, and, yes, even eggs. While it's a technique that even beginner chefs can easily master, using sous vide to prepare eggs requires a little extra care and precision, especially if you don't want the yolk to break while it's cooking. Here's an easy way to avoid that from happening.

One of the most common ways to cook eggs sous vide is to put them directly into the water bath. However, this is risky at best and a total disaster at worst. It's all too easy to break the yolk or crack the shell and ruin what should've been a delicious, cooked-to-perfection egg (and end up with bits of shell in your breakfast, yuck, not to mention possibly ending up in, and damaging, the sous vide machine itself). A smarter way to prepare them if you don't want broken yolks is to cook the eggs in a plastic bag. Delishably recommends putting the whole eggs into plastic bags and vacuum sealing before dropping them into the water. This will protect both the shell and the yolk.

Lifehacker also says you can wrap the eggs in plastic wrap before submerging them. You can do this with the eggs whole (uncracked) or crack them into greased squares of plastic for a perfectly poached egg.