Poaching (cooking)
Poaching is particularly suitable for delicate food, such as eggs, poultry, fish and fruit, which might easily fall apart or dry out. For this reason, it is important to keep the heat low and to keep the poaching time to a bare minimum, which will also preserve the flavor of the food.
The poaching liquid is called court bouillon and a classical court bouillon consists of an acid (wine, lemon juice) and aromatics (bouquet garni and mirepoix). The liquid should ideally be around 160–185 °F (71–85 °C), but when poaching chicken, it is vital that the chicken reach an internal temperature of at least 165 °F (74 °C) in the core, in order to be ingested safely. Poached eggs are generally cooked in water and vinegar, fish in white wine, poultry in stock and fruit in red wine. Typically an egg is poached just to the point where the white is no longer runny and the yolk is beginning to harden around the edges. The bouquet garni [buk? ?a?ni] (French for "garnished bouquet") is a bundle of herbs usually tied together with string and mainly used to prepare soup, stock, and various stews. The bouquet is cooked with the other ingredients, but is removed prior to consumption. There is no generic recipe for bouquet garni, but most recipes include parsley, thyme and bay leaf. Depending on the recipe, the bouquet garni may also include basil, burnet, chervil, rosemary, peppercorns, savory and tarragon. Vegetables such as carrot, celery (leaves or stem), celeriac, leek, onion and parsley root are sometimes included in the bouquet. Sometimes, the bouquet is not bound with string, and its ingredients are filled into a small sachet, a net, or even a tea strainer, instead. Traditionally, the aromatics are bound within leek leaves, though a coffee filter (or cheesecloth) and butcher twine can be used, instead. In Devon, thyme is rarely used in the recipe.[citation needed] Dishes made with a bouquet garni include: Boeuf bourguignon Pot au feu Brown Windsor soup Poule au pot Carbonnade flamande Lapin chasseur Blanquette de veau Ossobuco Bouillabaisse Court-bouillon French onion soup Cassoulet Garden parsley is a bright green, hairless, biennial, herbaceous plant in temperate climates, or an annual herb in subtropical and tropical areas. Where it grows as a biennial, in the first year, it forms a rosette of tripinnate leaves 10–25 cm long with numerous 1–3 cm leaflets, and a taproot used as a food store over the winter. In the second year, it grows a flowering stem to 75 cm tall with sparser leaves and flat-topped 3–10 cm diameter umbels with numerous 2 mm diameter yellow to yellowish-green flowers. The seeds are ovoid, 2–3mm long, with prominent style remnants at the apex. One of the compounds of the essential oil is apiol. The plant normally dies after seed maturation