la.foodblogging

If you’re like me, you “cheat” from time to time and buy some premade salads. Around here, we’re spoiled by Trader Joe’s with their wide and evolving selection of salads. I like a variety of them, from the basic to the chicken topped and even the Thai noodle. Sometimes I want to feel like I’m actually making something and I have this easy tip to take your sald from premade to pretentious.

Let’s start with a basic salad, the Country Italian:

The first step in making things fancy, let’s not even eat it out of the plastic container! A quick clip of the plastic tie downs and the laborious task of dumping out the greens and we have a properly served salad:

Now, the first time you attempt this task, you will find that you may need to shimmy the goods around to avoid unsightly clumping of ingredients.

So how do we take this from premade to pretentious? Using the simple, incredible, edible egg:

When I poach eggs, I always crack them into little bowls and bring them out of the refrigerator. I use metal bowls only now after having a glass bowl shatter in my hands one time when I was putting an egg in the water. The real secret to poaching eggs and the one tip that will put your eggs over the top is a splash or two of white vinegar in the water. This keeps the egg whites WHITE and also seems to keep the egg from spreading out too much in the water.

After the vinegared water has come to a simmer, dip the egg bowl into the bath and let the egg slide out. Use the bowl to essentially pour any egg left on top of what is in the water so that the egg stay together as much as possible.

The magic time to poach an egg is three minutes. But there’s a little more to that. I set my timer for three minutes and after it beeps, I turn off the heat. I let the egg sit for another 20-43 seconds to set the yolk slightly so that it will hopefully be just creamy.

So what do eggs have to do with salad? Well, they go on top. Using a slotted spoon and draining off as much water as possible, move the eggs on top of your nicely arranged greens.

When the eggs look comfortable, dress them up with, well, dressing (comes with the salad) and get cracking with a little pepper. I like it to be a little coarse and perhaps add some chunky kosher salt for texture and flavor:

And for the real test, dip your fork into an egg and let the yolk spill out:

The creamy yellowy goodness slowly oozes out (in a good way) and I like to mix the egg whites in while also getting some mixed into the rest of the salad.

So there you have it. For a very little bit of $$, a splash of vinegar and a trip to TJs you too can have a pretentious salad. Also, most salads will do just fine with a single poached egg, but I like to make mine a double.

By Jonah (see more of his posts). Jonah is the founder of la.foodblogging and also created Digesty, a food blog aggregator and Cheww.com, a spam free foodblog search engine.