I daubed with SV for some time now and cooked plenty of eggs in different combinations of time and temperature to get all kind of textures. I never heard of SV eggs cooked for more than 90 minutes. I can't even find mentions of a long slow cooking setup for eggs, I'm talking about at least 12 hours if not 24.
Is it because of texture problems, health hazard? I can't see the reason I can't find even a hint about longer cooking time. Anybody has any experience or opinion about this?
by the way I just dropped a batch in a 56.7C water and I plan to see the different timing for myself. I'll report!
According to the Modernist Cuisine people, there's no problem here.
First of all, there's something called an on-sen tamago (hot-springs egg), which is a Japanese trick for cooking an egg for a really long time at not especially hot. There's an old Sefardic sand-baked egg thing that's sort of similar. So this isn't a revelation.
Basically the point is that your egg is pasteurized at something like 130F (I can look that up if you want--the book isn't within reach), so long as you hold it there for at least 20 minutes or so. At that point it appears in every way to be a raw egg, and will cook and handle almost exactly like a raw egg as well. Any temperature you take the egg to beyond this is done entirely because of the texture you want.
What's more, it makes no difference how long the egg sits at a temperature: if you leave it at the soft-boiled egg temperature for 24 hours, it will remain a soft-boiled egg. The only thing that's going to make it get harder is if it goes to a higher temperature.
Now presumably there must be a limit here, because an egg shell is porous. At some point, I would think you'd get enough seepage of the bath-water into the egg that you'd get some loss of desired qualities. But that's not going to happen for a long time.
I remember reading somewhere that David Chang, at Momofuku, needs to have firm on-sen tamago ready to go all the time. So he keeps a bath going at that temperature, and at the start of the day he puts in all the eggs he thinks he'll need for an entire day's service. Whenever they get an order that needs one, they pull it and it's always ready to go.
You should be able to find Modernist Cuisine or Modernist Cuisine At Home at a local library if you look around. Both books have a two-page spread about this, where the page is all black with white text, and running across are two rows of cut-open eggs, by temperature. You just decide which you want, dial in the temperature, and wait half an hour or so.
Yep, it makes sense. At the 24 hrs mark I popped the little bastard open and surprise surprise, the texture was as perfect as the ones cooked strictly by the hour mark or less.
Also: basically completely absent was the coagulated white which is present in almost all combinations of time temperature. That's a plus! AND (
Be careful! Somewhere around there is another thread where I actually tried it. It don't work. Basically the white merely coagulates to the temperature level, but the yolk slowly cooks to death even at remarkably low temperatures. You can have a runny white AND a green-rimmed chalky yolk if you want!
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