Soft Boiled Egg

Growing up my best friend was Hungarian and the only thing he knew how to cook was a soft boiled egg. He knew how to cook that because it was his favorite breakfast and most of the times his parents were off to work long before he woke up. Even to this day I use his recipe whenever I want to start my day with a soft boiled eggs and I always do so fondly remembering that first lesson and here it is:

1. If you have a classic 4 cookers stove avoid the temptation to use the larger cooker, although the water will come to boil faster it will do so in an uncontrolled fashion.
2. Cover the egg or eggs in 1 inch of water – that means the water should cover the eggs and then have an extra inch from the top of the highest egg to the water surface.
3. Also you will need to add some salt in the water, about a quarter of a teaspoon.
4. Keep the stove on high watching for the moment water starts to boil and then reduce the fire to the lowest setting – see what I meant about the big burner messing up the math?

5. Leave it there slowly simmering for precisely 3 minutes, 30 seconds over that and you will have lost that soft boiled egg where the egg white is perfectly done and the yolk is perfectly soft, runny and creamy and you’ll end up with an almost hardened yolk. And yes, that means that if you don’t really like soft boiled eggs you can just leave the eggs on the stove for another minute or so.
6. Now, you are not out of the woods yet because all that heat is still trapped in the egg and is still cooking the yolk so run your egg under a cold tap of water for another 3 to 5 minutes depending on how hot you want your soft boiled egg.
7. Enjoy your soft boiled egg remembering with kindness a sunny school free Friday when one Hungarian kid was teaching his best friend how to cook soft boiled eggs!

Now you can call me a soft boiled egg fanatic or you could just say, like some of my friends that I have a Peter Pan complex that jumps out of the blue when you list expected but as the time has passed, and now as I look back I can actually be certain, from that day on I must have started eating more and more soft boiled eggs because right now I can’t imagine a week going by without me enjoying at least one breakfast like that one.

And to tell you the truth I have actually started cheating because now as I go about making my soft boiled eggs I use a machine, you can get it here. I first saw it in a show, not sure if I should be a name dropper, but let’s just say I saw the inventor pitching it to a couple of millionaires and I immediately started looking for it. In the meanwhile it has actually gotten so much publicity that you can get it from Amazon too. In the interest of full disclosure the below is an affiliate account but I’m not saying you should buy it! Some days I use a sauce pan and make my soft boiled egg just to remember the feeling of my childhood and other times I just through about half a dozen in there and get the breakfast ready for the entire family.