I have made many eggs in my lifetime. Scrambled for my kids: soft and runny for one, firmer for his brother. Soft-boiled for myself: boiling water, eggs straight in, five minutes, then set aside into egg cups and allowed to settle for two minutes. This is not perfectly reproducible across kitchens or altitudes or egg sizes, but it works for me, which is all that matters when I’m making breakfast.
Browse a little, and you’ll discover an online frenzy to make Perfect Eggs. I’m not immune to this. The rabbit holes are deep: forums, YouTube tutorials, food scientists with thermometers and stop watches, all converging on the same promise of a single correct method.
Kenji López-Alt’s notes on boiled eggs have long informed my own method, so I jumped to attention when I landed on his steamer approach on Serious Eats. The science seemed sound: Steam cooks more gently and evenly than boiling water does. It’s quicker because you don’t need to bring a whole pot to a boil, and the risk of the shell cracking is smaller, too.
So I pulled out my steamer basket and got going. The eggs were good, and I will probably use this method again for egg salad, but for a naked egg, served most mornings in my house, I will probably stick to boiling. What was interesting, and what I’d fallen prey to, was this generally online idea that there is somehow, somewhere a Perfect Boiled Egg.
Tempting as it may be, I don’t find the idea of a perfect anything very useful. It makes you seek something that isn’t about you — your taste buds, your mood, your likes and dislikes — but rather about a static platonic ideal, a silver bullet to all culinary dilemmas. It eliminates wonder, discovery and subjectivity.
By liberating myself from this concept, I can appreciate the variety of ways to make eggs: well-cooked, as my youngest likes them, or set but still soft at the center, as in a Spanish tortilla. Or hard-boiled, then cracked, not peeled, as with Chinese tea eggs, so that the tea and spice can work their way in and leave beautiful dark patterns across the white.
In Japan, I was served what I assumed would be a soft-boiled egg alongside rice, grilled mackerel and pickles for breakfast. In fact, it was raw. I was then shown how you stir it into the hot rice, letting the heat from the grains do the work, until you have something just barely thickened and silky coating each grain.
I know my dippy eggs (with their lovely runny centers and soft whites) aren’t a universal truth. It is just what I do, most mornings, before anything else has happened. I’ve stopped trying to improve it.
This week’s recipe has a similar informality. Maybe for when people are coming for brunch — eggs torn open by hand, asparagus charred with garlic, chipotle for smoke and heat, basil at the end because spring asparagus always needs freshness.
It’s perfect, just not Perfect.
