Sous Vide Egg FAQ

Help! My egg bites are sticking to the jar. What can I do to remove them more easily?

There are a few options for how to go about getting your egg bites cleanly out of the jars once cooked. In our kitchen, we like to place the toppings right in the jar and eat from the jar using a spoon! They are super easy to store and transport this way.

If you prefer to remove the bites from the jar, one suggestion is to remove them immediately after cooking; running a thin knife around the jar first to loosen the bites might help this. Another tip we’ve seen is to first grease the jars (using cooking spray, butter, etc.) to help them come unstuck more easily. Finally, many of our users-turned-egg-bite-aficionados recommend using silicone molds (such as this one) for quick and painless removal. Sadly, we have not tested these methods in our kitchen, so we are not able to speak with certainty on any cook-time changes that might be necessary with a change in container. If you have a Facebook account, we’d highly recommend checking out the Cook With Joule Facebook group for additional tips on egg bites.

What is so great about sous vide eggs? Try to explain it to me.

A few things. One, you can achieve textures with sous vide eggs that you could never get with traditionally cooked ones. Think decadently creamy yolks and tender whites with just a little bit of pull. Two, you can dial in times and temps to get the exact yolks and whites you want. Check out our Egg Calculator to learn how to do it. Finally, with sous vide, you can make a bunch of eggs at once—which comes in handy when you are making eggs for the whole brood. Provided you have fresh, high-quality eggs, results will be consistently delicious, every time.

While sous vide eggs are amazing and pretty versatile, not everyone will love them. If you are in this camp, we recommend our Emoji Egg or a Julia Child–style omelet!

Is it possible to pasteurize eggs in the shell with sous vide?

Absolutely! Our resident sous vide food-safety expert, Dr. Douglas Baldwin, has found that to pasteurize whole eggs in the shell, you would need to “place the egg in 135 °F (57 °C) water for at least 1 hour and 15 minutes (Schuman et al., 1997).” This is from his website A Practical Guide to Sous Vide Cooking, and more information can be found here.

 I tried the Can’t-F***-It-Up Egg Benedict, and my egg whites are watery. Why is this?

Egg whites will be a bit watery at 147 °F. Using a slotted spoon to drain away the excess white is really helpful for presentation! Even then, the egg white is a gel that’s just barely holding itself together, and the taste will differ somewhat from traditionally cooked eggs.

One of my eggs cracked in the water. What should I do?

If possible, use a slotted spoon to scoop up the egg and any debris floating in the water. After the cook, please clean Joule by following the steps here. If this is something that is happening often, you can cook the eggs whole inside of a sous vide bag!   

Help! My eggs are cracking as soon as I place them in the water!

The best solution for this is to lower the eggs very carefully into the water with a spider ladle or similar tool (something like this). If that doesn’t seem to make a difference, you can try ladling some of the hot water into a sous vide bag and then add the eggs to the bag. You would then place the bag into the water and clip the top of the bag to the side of the cooking vessel.

If I can make ramen eggs (soft-boiled) in 8 minutes and hard-boiled eggs in 20 minutes, why do poached eggs take 60 to 90 minutes?

As the temperature decreases, it takes longer to get the same yolk texture. Roughly, for every drop of 5 °C to 10 °C in water temperature, the cooking time doubles—for yolks, for braised meat, and for most proteins. As we get closer to 60 °C, it takes a smaller temperature change to double the time to get the same yolk texture; some people will even cook eggs overnight at 60 °C to 62 °C so they’re ready when they wake up. The egg white, though, has different proteins than the yolk and just won’t get as firm as hard-boiled eggs at lower temperatures.

No matter which egg recipe I do, I can’t get the whites to set. What am I doing wrong?

Eggs cooked sous vide will have a different texture and feel than eggs cooked traditionally. Unless you are hard-boiling the eggs, sous vide egg whites are going to be a bit more watery than you may be used to. Breaking the eggs over a slotted spoon makes a big difference in the presentation, as the excess white will drain away, leaving only the more-set white.

To ensure success when cooking eggs, make sure to use fresh eggs. As eggs age, the proteins in the whites break down faster and you can end up with a runnier white. If you want to try a firmer white, check out our egg calculator! It allows you to input a lot of different variables for more precise control. You can manually set a temperature and time in the Joule app to cook the eggs to your desired doneness.

All of our egg recipes were developed using medium-sized AA eggs that were cold from the fridge. If you are using different-sized eggs, the egg calculator can help control for this variable! Have duck eggs handy? We have a guide for those in the Joule app as well!