Category: Hacks
Can You Cook an Egg in the Dishwasher?
I had a reader ask if you can poach an egg in a dishwasher. It’s an interesting cooking hack and the answer isn’t obvious.
In theory, it should be possible. Eggs held at 140—144°F / 60—62.5°C for long enough will begin to set; this is the concept behind sous vide cooking. Here’s the chart for this from the second edition of Cooking for Geeks:
Dishwashers have heating elements and can get hot enough. In practice, though? It is doable—others have pulled it off. But the directions call for adding boiling hot water, and while an awesome breakfast party trick, I wanted to see if a straight-up attempt would work, using the high-heat cycle of the dishwasher I have on hand.
I’d be curious for others to try this and let me know what results you get!
Making Yogurt
One of the fun things about working on the book is the “need” to test everything. I say “need” because, in truth, it’s a lot of fun to geek out over the details and try more permutations than I might otherwise try. (Just like a good coder, gotta try to hit the boundary conditions in writing recipes!)
Yogurt is really way easier to make than I thought: toss a spoon of yogurt into a container of milk and let it sit long enough in a warm environment, and the bacteria from the yogurt (needs to be “live culture”) will chow down on the lactose in the milk. My oven hovers around 110 F when the oven light is on (it probably helps that it’s 9 billion degrees outside right now) – easier than pie.
There are some precautions you should take to avoid culturing the wrong kind of bacteria, so if you want to be thorough, you should do a bit more than “just” toss milk+yogurt into the oven. For a good write-up, see extension.missouri.edu/publications/DisplayPub.aspx?P=GH1183.
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