cooking
eggs
instant pot
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All About Eggs in Instant Pot
I can sum up cooking eggs in an Instant Pot in two words: easy and frustrating!
Cooking eggs conventionally, we have boiled, baked, steamed, poached, and fried, to name a few. Among the "in the shell" methods, we call them "two-minute eggs", or whatever length of time you want them cooked to get the yolk the way you like it. Sounds easy enough.
With Instant Pot, we have different models/sizes to contend with, but we also have altitude and psi to take into account.
Altitude because the temperature of boiling water changes depending on your altitude, and pressure cookers cook with pressurized boiling (above boiling, even) steam. So if someone in Denver, Colorado is telling you to cook a recipe for 30 minutes, in Seattle you're gonna cook it for a little less time. A handy little cheat sheet lives here, if you happen to be curious.
On top of that, different models of pressure cookers operate at different psi, pounds of pressure per square inch. Stove top models and many electric models cook at 15psi on high, while inexplicably most Instant Pot models top out a little over 12psi. So the intersection of altitude and model can make differences in cook times, which you can geek out about over here, if you wanna know the ins and outs of that (and funny enough, uses the same comparison of Denver, CO in altitude adjustments that I chose to).
So what does this mean for me, an Instant Pot user at sea level? Not much for most recipes, honestly. I will be trying to make a note of online recipes and where the author is from in future, at least. But it makes a big difference when we're talking about a very short cooking window, as with eggs. Literally one minute difference, can produce runny or hardened results. Add on manual or natural release, and whether you shock the egg after to stop cooking and you have a handful of steps where the finished product can vary widely. Based on ONE MINUTE of cook time. No pressure, would-be Julia Childs (I made a punny! "No pressure, " get it?!" *ahem*)
Recently I followed a comprehensive blog post where a home cook took beautiful photos of her 1-5 minute "poached" eggs. Specifically I was looking sidelong at her images of a perfectly drippy 5 minute high-pressure egg, when I get similar results at 2 minutes in-shell. How could 5 minutes come out gooey in a silicone cup, and with no ice bath to follow? I decided to try 4 minutes and came out with just-this-side-of-hard boiled, confirming my skepticism. Which is what went me down a rabbit hole to try and suss out why her results could be so different from mine. And it turns out that while we were using the same model of IP, and I used the exact same silicone cups even, she is a few thousand feet above sea level. Could that be the difference? I am going to find out!
Next experiment is LOW pressure poached eggs, as outlined on The Kitchn when briefly discussing the purpose of low-pressure settings on our pressure cookers. Up to now, I have been doing 2 minute eggs on high pressure, followed by an ice bath. The results are a gooey yolk, which I love, but sometimes the whites don't set all the way inside which I do NOT like. So the next test will be a low pressure setting for 3 minutes with manual/quick release and see what we get. I will try to report back soon!
Some inspiring recipes I found while looking for info on my blog post:
Egg Papin - Poached Eggs in Bell Pepper Cup
Eggs En Cocotte - "French Baked Eggs"
Cooking eggs conventionally, we have boiled, baked, steamed, poached, and fried, to name a few. Among the "in the shell" methods, we call them "two-minute eggs", or whatever length of time you want them cooked to get the yolk the way you like it. Sounds easy enough.
With Instant Pot, we have different models/sizes to contend with, but we also have altitude and psi to take into account.
Altitude because the temperature of boiling water changes depending on your altitude, and pressure cookers cook with pressurized boiling (above boiling, even) steam. So if someone in Denver, Colorado is telling you to cook a recipe for 30 minutes, in Seattle you're gonna cook it for a little less time. A handy little cheat sheet lives here, if you happen to be curious.
On top of that, different models of pressure cookers operate at different psi, pounds of pressure per square inch. Stove top models and many electric models cook at 15psi on high, while inexplicably most Instant Pot models top out a little over 12psi. So the intersection of altitude and model can make differences in cook times, which you can geek out about over here, if you wanna know the ins and outs of that (and funny enough, uses the same comparison of Denver, CO in altitude adjustments that I chose to).
So what does this mean for me, an Instant Pot user at sea level? Not much for most recipes, honestly. I will be trying to make a note of online recipes and where the author is from in future, at least. But it makes a big difference when we're talking about a very short cooking window, as with eggs. Literally one minute difference, can produce runny or hardened results. Add on manual or natural release, and whether you shock the egg after to stop cooking and you have a handful of steps where the finished product can vary widely. Based on ONE MINUTE of cook time. No pressure, would-be Julia Childs (I made a punny! "No pressure, " get it?!" *ahem*)
Recently I followed a comprehensive blog post where a home cook took beautiful photos of her 1-5 minute "poached" eggs. Specifically I was looking sidelong at her images of a perfectly drippy 5 minute high-pressure egg, when I get similar results at 2 minutes in-shell. How could 5 minutes come out gooey in a silicone cup, and with no ice bath to follow? I decided to try 4 minutes and came out with just-this-side-of-hard boiled, confirming my skepticism. Which is what went me down a rabbit hole to try and suss out why her results could be so different from mine. And it turns out that while we were using the same model of IP, and I used the exact same silicone cups even, she is a few thousand feet above sea level. Could that be the difference? I am going to find out!
Next experiment is LOW pressure poached eggs, as outlined on The Kitchn when briefly discussing the purpose of low-pressure settings on our pressure cookers. Up to now, I have been doing 2 minute eggs on high pressure, followed by an ice bath. The results are a gooey yolk, which I love, but sometimes the whites don't set all the way inside which I do NOT like. So the next test will be a low pressure setting for 3 minutes with manual/quick release and see what we get. I will try to report back soon!
Some inspiring recipes I found while looking for info on my blog post:
Egg Papin - Poached Eggs in Bell Pepper Cup
Eggs En Cocotte - "French Baked Eggs"
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