poaching an egg in frying canola oil

The only thing you did wrong was to try to poach an egg in oil, at least hot oil. Dropping an egg into really hot oil is going to cause all the water in the egg to turn to steam very quickly, hence the nuclear mutant effect you no doubt got.

If you want to poach in oil then you need to keep the temperature way down. I don't see any reason you couldn't poach eggs in oil as long as it's below the boiling point of water. I could see both benefits and drawbacks to that method, if you try it please post the result. The viscosity of oil may help keep the egg together, then again the result is likely to be greasy, which defeats the purpose of poaching.

As for other fluids where poaching yields something more pleasant, why not water? It's what eggs are typically poached in, it works well, and it's cheap. As for other things I've poached with, the best result was salmon poached in Champagne. I made that for my girlfriend and she ended up marrying me. It can't be me, so it must be my cooking.

You can poach in any medium you'd like. You are only concerned with heating the egg enough to coagulate the whites and/or yolks if you want. Eggs poached in tomato sauce are amazing. The only caveats to poaching in other liquids other than water is the pH and temperature. Obviously you can't get water above the boil point without pressure so your not super concerned about the puffy effect you experienced but with other mediums like oil, you will boil of the water so quickly it will puff up the white and set hard.

Slow poaching in oil is a possibility but to evaluate the benefits you have to keep in mind that in order for the egg to take on the flavors of the cooking medium the flavors have to be fat soluble.

well that qualifies as a ripple in your chef hat. (in the old days the number of ripples in the hat meant the number of different ways the chef could make eggs).

Here are some tricks for poaching eggs [in water]:

• Use an 8-10" [non-stick] skillet filled to the brim and bring to boil and turn the heat to lowest. The idea is to prevent the egg from sinking and crashing into the bottom and easy access for fishing them out.
• Add 2 table-spoons of vinegar, and two tea-spoons of salt. The vinegar will help set the egg white fast so the egg keep its shape and not disintegrate.
• Use as freshest eggs as possible (they sprawl less) and break them into small cups.
• Lower the edge of the cups to the water and drop the eggs in. You want the least disturbance to the egg.
• Turn off the heat and cover for 4 minutes, 4 1/2 or more for harder yolk or bigger eggs (ducks go very well here).
• Pull them out with a slotted spoon. If you don't have one, you can use two nearly overlapping spoon so to drain the excess water while keeping the egg.

I know this is an old post but I tried this morning to "deep fry" an egg with similar results I bet. Then I let the oil cool to about 200 degrees and cracked it into a metal ladle submerged in the oil. Results were very good. I filled and drained hot oil in the ladle several times during cooking. I took it out a little soon, the whites were not as set as I liked, returned to oil for another minute. Yellow was still runny and quite yummy. I had deep fried potatoes first at 350 and thought why not but soon learned as the original post-er there was a reason this is not a popular suggested way to cook an egg. Temperature is everything! :)