Basic Egg Dishes

The simplest egg preparations — boiled, poached, fried, scrambled — are exercises in temperature control. Each dish exploits the staged coagulation of egg proteins at different temperatures, and the quality difference between a perfectly cooked egg and an overcooked one is always a matter of just a few degrees.

Boiled eggs

“Boiled” eggs should never actually boil. A rolling boil is violent enough to crack shells, and the sustained high temperature overcoagulates the proteins. A gentle simmer — 180–190°F/82–87°C — is the correct cooking medium.

Custards

A custard is egg proteins diluted in milk or cream, cooked until the proteins form a delicate network that traps the liquid. The fundamental ratio — roughly 1 egg per 1 cup liquid plus 2 tablespoons sugar — produces a gel so fragile that a few degrees of overcooking can destroy it. Mastering custards means mastering temperature control.

The two families

All custards divide into two categories based on how they’re cooked:

Egg Foams

An egg foam is a mass of air bubbles stabilized by a protein network — a structure unique to egg whites. When whisked, egg white proteins unfold at the air-water interface and bond into a continuous film that reinforces bubble walls, turning a liquid into a semi-solid that can hold its shape against gravity. This is the basis of meringue, soufflé, angel food cake, mousse, and many other preparations.

Eggs

Eggs are the most versatile ingredient in cooking — they thicken, emulsify, leaven, bind, coat, and enrich. This versatility comes from their proteins, which respond to heat, acid, air, and mechanical force in predictable ways that no other single ingredient can match. Understanding egg science means understanding the biology first: every cooking property the egg possesses is a side effect of its original job — supporting 21 days of embryonic development inside a sealed calcium shell.