The delectable salad known as the “Cobb” hit tables in the 1930s in Hollywood’s Brown Derby Restaurant. It was created by Robert H. Cobb, who gave the salad its name. This everything-but-the-kitchen-sink salad would have the potential to be a jumbled conglomeration were it not for the fact that all the ingredients — the lettuce, the bacon bits, shredded roasted chicken, crumbles of blue cheese, avocado, and hard-boiled eggs — line up in neat rows on the plate. The only thing that would make this classic combination any better would be a swap — just replace the hard-boiled eggs with poached eggs. Allow us to explain why.
While a hard-boiled egg and a poached egg are similar in taste — except that one’s cooked with the shell on and the other’s cooked, well, naked — the poached egg offers a couple of benefits that the boiled egg doesn’t. First, cooking poached eggs takes a lot less time than cooking a hard-boiled egg – two to four minutes versus more like 10 minutes.
Second, with poached eggs, you can go straight to cutting them up instead of taking the extra time to peel them. Because the cooking process flattens the egg, cutting it is easier. Or you can leave the yolk runny and plop the whole poached egg right on top. This is a particularly delicious variation if you’re turning a classic, buttery eggs Benedict recipe into a variation on the Cobb salad by combining all the fixings with English muffin croutons and a creamy dressing.
Prepping the poached eggs
When you’re trying to make perfect poached eggs for a Cobb salad, the process isn’t any different than it would be when you’re making poached eggs for another recipe. That is, you’re going to dunk some cracked eggs into simmering water until they’re cooked to your liking. That said, you do want to keep a few things in mind as you cook.
Cobb salad requires a number of cooked and nicely cut ingredients, so you want to ensure that everything is assembled on the salad before you start the eggs. If you don’t do it that way, you could end up with cold, hard-poached eggs before you’ve even made the rows of salad ingredients.
As such, your order of operations should be to cook the protein, slice up the vegetables, and then assemble the goodies on a bed of lettuce before topping everything with your eggs. Ideally, the poached eggs will be fresh out of the pan so that they’re warm. This’ll give you a juxtaposition of hot and soft ingredients next to cold, crisp ones. Plus, poached eggs have a particularly velvety texture, which makes this amazing combination just that much better.
