I’ve become somewhat obsessed with making poached eggs in the microwave ever since Graham Norton mentioned doing it on his radio show/podcast a few weeks ago.

According the Graham, just break an egg into a ramekin that has a small bit of room temperature water in it, then throw it into the microwave for between 50 to 65 seconds, adjusting the time based upon one’s individual microwave. Apparently microwaves are finicky. As if I didn’t know.

I remember Atrios mentioning something similar on his blog a few months back, so I searched the web and found a plethora of different methods. Several of them did mention to watch out for exploding eggs.

Having been duly warned, I decided to try Graham’s method, as he seemed to swear by it, and whaddaya know. Within seconds I had exploding egg all over the inside of my microwave. But here’s the thing. The egg that remained in the ramekin (and most of it had remained in the ramekin) was a reasonably poached egg.

So I kept experimenting. I decided that I needed to reduce the setting from 100%, so I gradually kept lowering it all the way down to 50%, but still the eggs kept exploding, but as the eggs were deliciously poached (most of the time) I decided that cleaning the microwave was easier than the old fashioned way of poaching eggs. I’ve even done the microwaving in two stages (25 seconds, stop, another 25 seconds), but that hasn’t prevented the explosions.

By the way, my microwave is made by Samsung, so perhaps explosions are just endemic to their brand.

Anyway, I finally tried 40% power. And covered them with plastic wrap. And did it in two stages. And that finally worked.

Hooray!

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