I’ve cracked it: Now Nigella gets knack of ... poaching eggs!

SEA bass in sherry or cappuccino pavlova? No problem. Calvados syllabub or naan pizza? Easy!

But there is one recipe that Nigella Lawson could never just whip up... poaching an egg.

The TV cook, who has released her 11th book, admitted she used to live in fear of being asked to make one.

‘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,’ she told the Cheltenham Literature Festival.

‘ But I have cracked it now, no pun intended,’ she added.

Miss Lawson, 57, said it was a French friend who eventually helped her work out the best technique.

Now, with the help of a tea strainer and lemon, poached eggs are back on the menu in her kitchen.

‘I crack the egg into a tea strainer over a cup and all the very watery bits go underneath,’ she explained.

‘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 to the boil and then I just leave it there for three or four minutes.’

She told the festival audience that she uses a spoon to help form the egg into a neat round shape just before the white has set. She said: ‘I can sometimes, with my slotted 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.’

And she explained how it is that poached eggs in restaurants always seem to come out in a neat uniform shape. Staff simply use scissors to cut off the ‘straggly bit’ of poached egg before serving it to customers, she said.

Miss Lawson, who sees herself as a home cook rather than a chef, also revealed she once turned down an invitation to cook at Downing Street.

‘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.’

Miss Lawson, who has sold 12million books, said her ability with knives was the skill she needed to improve.

And 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.’