Home › Breakfast Dishes › To Steam Eggs
To Steam Eggs
Break the eggs into a shallow dish, season to taste, and steam from three to five minutes.
A one-line recipe that assumes a stovetop steamer and a cook who knows what a set white looks like. The whole thing hinges on keeping the water at a bare simmer rather than a hard boil.
- The vesselA "shallow dish" means a heatproof plate, gratin dish or pie plate that fits inside a covered steamer or a wide pan with a rack. Butter it generously; steamed egg white sticks to bare ceramic and metal.
- Keep the water lowHard boiling water throws violent steam and toughens the whites into rubber before the yolks warm through. Hold the water at a lazy simmer and keep the lid on so the heat is even and gentle.
- Timing and donenessThree minutes gives barely-set whites and liquid yolks; five gives firm whites and yolks still soft in the centre. Depth matters more than the clock, so judge by a white that has turned opaque all the way to the yolk. Carryover cooking continues on the hot dish, so pull it a shade early.
- Seasoning"Season to taste" here almost certainly means salt and pepper, and a scrape of butter on top is a common accompaniment. Salt added before cooking is often said to speckle or mottle the whites; if you want them uniformly white, season after.
- Number of eggsThe original gives no quantity. Allow one or two eggs per person and use a dish wide enough that they do not run together.
- Substitute if you have no steamerA wide skillet with a half inch of simmering water and a tight lid, dish set on a jar ring or crumpled foil, does the same job. The dish should not sit in the water.
- Soft yolksAt three minutes the yolk is not pasteurised. For anyone who should avoid undercooked egg, cook until both white and yolk are firm.
Steaming was among the mildest of the ways a breakfast cook could handle an egg, and cookbooks list it alongside boiled, poached, shirred, scrambled and fried, often in exactly this telegraphic style — the book assumes the reader owns a steamer and needs only the timing. It is often said to have been suited to invalids and children, since it uses no fat at all, a point of some importance in a period when fried food was widely blamed for indigestion and when "digestible" cooking was a stated goal of domestic science writers. The technique is essentially shirred eggs without the oven, and it has an evident resemblance to the Chinese and Japanese steamed egg custards, which use the same low, even, moist heat for the same reason: it sets protein without ever letting it boil.