Eggs poached & scrambled

The food column in yesterday's NYT Magazine, by a chef named Daniel Patterson, is about egg cookery. The setup:

When I was given a temporary reprieve from the daily routines of restaurant kitchens early last year, I decided to try acting like a civilized person and eat a proper breakfast.

I'm all for that. Patterson decides to fry eggs for breakfast in his nonstick pan but soon enough his fiancée makes him throw it away for fear of its toxic fumes. When you heat up a nonstick pan past the medium stage the fumes are strong enough to kill birds. Ok, that's too bad for the birds and those who love them. But seriously, do the fumes harm humans? No one can say for certain that they do or do not but some people aren't taking any chances. But wait a second. Should you scramble your eggs in a pan that has been preheated to 600 degrees? No, never, terrible idea. I should have stopped reading at this point but I continued because I'll read anything about cooking eggs. Once the Teflon is out we get a montage of unsuccessful alternatives:

Attempts at making scrambled eggs in a regular sauté pan led to crusty egg proteins stuck to the cooking surface, no matter how much fat I used. Eggs fried in a cast-iron pan spattered everywhere - not to mention that fried eggs without bacon just didn't seem right, and nor did bacon as a daily staple. Soft-boiled eggs were far too irritating to peel before coffee, and even the thought of dry, mealy, hard-boiled eggs made me cringe. If I wanted eggs for breakfast, it seemed, I was going to have to poach them.

A chef can't figure out how to fry eggs in a regular pan? Can't tolerate a bit of grease to wipe up after breakfast? Can't peel an egg? Can't hard cook one properly either? Given this information, why should I take this person's culinary advice?

So he eats regular poached eggs every day for breakfast until he tires of them, at which point he is about to cry eureka:

what would happen, I wondered, if I beat the eggs before putting them in the water? I expected that they would act much as the intact eggs did and bind quickly, but I did not expect them to set into the lightest, most delicate scrambled eggs imaginable.

I believe our correspondent is talking about egg drop soup, hold the soup.

Lest we think it simple to pour beaten eggs into hot water, consider:

The most important factor is using only the thick whites and the yolk. At first I could get this technique to work only with very fresh farmer's-market eggs, whose viscous whites are high in protein (the main bonding agent). As eggs age, the thick part of the white erodes, and the thin, watery part increases, which is why fresh eggs (less than one week old) are best for eating, and older ones are better suited for meringues. This flummoxed me until a quick e-mail message to my friend Harold McGee, the food scientist and author of "On Food and Cooking," solved the problem. He discovered that using supermarket eggs is just fine if you start by cracking each one into a slotted spoon (or sieve) and let the thin white drain away, then work with the remaining thick white and yolk.

First of all, Harold McGee has become to food writing what Robert J. Thompson is to pop culture journalism, i.e., the only name in the rolodex. And if indeed McGee is the friend of every writer who calls him that, he must be, oh, just the friendliest person since Mr. Rogers.

Second of all, I tried straining my thin whites through a slotted spoon. Not a task I intend to repeat. The whole egg kept slipping off the spoon, then the whole white kept slipping off the yolk. I decided to give this scrambled/poached technique a try without straining out the thin whites and my week-old supermarket eggs set up just fine, thanks very much. This could be another solution to which there is no problem. Here's some more:

Next, beat the eggs with a fork, but don't add salt. (The grains of salt will tear the structure of the eggs, causing them to disintegrate on contact with the water.) Let a covered pot filled with about four inches of water come to a low boil over moderate heat, then remove the cover, add a little salt and stir the water in a clockwise motion. After you've created a mini-whirlpool, gently pour the eggs into the moving liquid, which will allow them to set suspended in the water rather than sink to the bottom of the pot, where they would stick.

I tried them two ways, with and without salt. Without salt they set up as one big blob of eggs, while with salt they fell apart into dozens of little strands. After being strained out, though, and assembled on my plate, the eggs with salt were just as edible and tasted just the same, but a bit saltier. I did make a whirlpool cuz it's fun, but I never make a whirlpool when poaching eggs the usual way in non-nonstick pans and my eggs don't stick to the pan. Things tend not to stick to pans filled with simmering water. Anyway...

The bad news: these eggs are bland and boring. Scrambled in a frying pan with butter over low heat, stirring constantly, eggs become rich and custardy. You can add cream, salt, extra butter, and other seasonings (e.g., tarragon). These poached/scrambled eggs might have been ok under a blanket of rich sauce but with just salt, pepper, and a bit of butter on top they were pretty lifeless. Actually, I hated them.

And the good news: my scrambled eggs are better than the ones in the New York Times.