Nigella Lawson reveals her bizarre trick to get perfect poached eggs everytime

How do you like your eggs in the morning? Boiled, fried and scrambled are simple, but ask your significant other to poach you an egg and you may end up going hungry.

The perfect poached egg is tricky. From thin, watery whites to split yolks, eggs that disintegrate in the pan or are ripped apart by bubbles, there are so many ways it can go wrong.

Two-thirds of Britons say they can’t poach eggs properly, and this week domestic goddess Nigella Lawson admitted even she was intimidated by the fiddly job until recently, when she devised a new approach — using a tea strainer.

She revealed that the flawless poached eggs served in restaurants aren’t so easily achieved, either: chefs use scissors to remove the scraggly ends before putting them on your plate.

So how do you perfectly poach an egg? The one incontrovertible piece of advice is this: freshly laid eggs (medium-sized are best) poach better than supermarket eggs. The latter may be up to 60 days old, so their inner membranes are weak and they will spread out in the pan.