The food Nigella Lawson confesses she only JUST learned to cook

She's thrilled fans with her decadent recipes and sumptuous desserts.

But it seems it's a far more humble food that perplexes Nigella Lawson - poached eggs.

According to the Daily Mail, the cook, who has just released her 11th recipe book, admitted to having a "fear" of the breakfast staple.

She told the Cheltenham Literature Festival: "One of the things I was convinced I could never do was poached egg and I had such a fear of egg poaching disproportionate to the task.

"But I have cracked it now, no pun intended."

The 57-year-old was taken under the wing of a French friend who gave her top poached egg tips - including using a tea strainer and adding lemon.

She explained: "I crack the egg into a tea strainer over a cup and all the very watery bits go underneath.

I then put it in another cup and I add a teaspoon of lemon juice to the white in the cup.

"Then I put it in the water, the water is almost turned off it's come the boil and then I just leave it there for three or four minutes.

"I can sometimes with my spotted spoon encourage the white to come up in that shape.

"If you want no straggly bits the best thing is to do the strainer. With egg poaching it depends how fresh the eggs are. As they sit in the shell the white gets watery and as that watery bit goes into the pan it goes straggly."

Explaining why hotel poached eggs often come out uniform, she said restaurants often use scissors to cut off the "straggly bit" of cooked egg before serving it to customers.

The cook - who has insisted she is not a chef - also revealed she once turned down an invitation to cook for Downing Street.

She explained: "When Tony Blair was Prime Minister he asked me if I'd cook something and I said 'I'm not a caterer.'

"I will certainly come up with the menu but I'm not cooking it.

"I'm not trained. I couldn't cook for a huge number of people.

"I would say about home cooking is that it is about flavour and not technique. I am not mad about technique-led food."

Lawson, who has sold 12 million books, said her knife skills often make her feel embarrassed' and admitted she had eaten better lemon meringue pies than her own.

Asked what she was not very good at making, she replied: "I feel I have eaten much better lemon meringue pies than I have made. I hope that will change one day and it made me come up with a very good lemon meringue cake."

This article was first published on Daily Mail and is republished here with permission.