My wife and I are out for breakfast this morning. She ordered her eggs over medium, and had to send them back immediately because she could tell just by looking at them that they weren’t what she wanted.
What do you expect if you order eggs over medium? I’m looking for a few responses before I say what she wanted and what she got.
Firm egg whites with a thick skin over the yolk maybe a small squirt of yolk still liquid.
Eggs over (fried on both sides) with a medium yolk (not runny, not hard – kind of in that jammy, thickened-but-not-set-hard phase.) It’s just part of the spectrum of over easy → over medium → over hard in terms of yolk doneness.
This is exactly what she wanted. When they brought her plate out, she could see the yolks jiggling and knew they weren’t cooked through. What she got was much closer to over easy.
You would think a halfway experienced fry cook workkng at a breakfast place would be able to tell the difference between over easy and over medium. And yet more often than not when she orders “over medium” she gets eggs that are too runny.
Yeah, what @chela and @pulykamell said. “Over” means they were flipped, so both surfaces were against the frying pan at some point. “Hard” means everything solid, “easy” means the yolk is still entirely liquid, “Medium” is in between, with the yolk still kind of gooey but not entirely liquid.
It’s probably a relatively difficult order to get right, without breaking the yolk.
I don’t think I’ve ever been at a ‘greasy spoon’ that wasn’t busy. My favorite place has one cook and one waitress (who calls everyone Darlin’ or Hon-Pie).
My point is they’re always got at least five orders going at once, with no time for quality control or do-overs.
So I order my eggs over medium, because I can deal with anything from runny yolks to gooey to firm-but-not-hard ones. Same with bacon, I’ve learned to take what they give me.
This.
Over easy is easy. Flip the eggs when the whites are solidified, count to 10, and flip onto the plate.
Over medium involves judging the doneness of something you can’t see; the yolk is then hidden under the white.
Not too hard if you’re cooking just one pair. But with 5-10 other breakfasts in progress on the same grill plate, the near split second timing is hard(er).
Why do you flip the eggs, Daddy? Aren’t they supposed to run like the wind when you poke ‘em (especially on a thick slab of scrapple)?
I usually get mine scrambled with cheese.
Yeah I’ve never ordered over medium because it just seems a difficult one to get right. When I get it at home, it’s usually because I screwed up an over easy leaving it just a bit too long. You don’t have much room for error for over medium it seems to me.
I agree with everyone else’s interpretation of what “over medium” is. But i only get that when i order over easy and they mess up. I’m willing to eat (sadly) over medium, though, so i don’t send it back
I would expect to get anything within a reasonable spectrum and would not send them back unless it was catastrophically wrong.
What your wife got was eminently reasonable.
What Colnfred just said
I would have been fine with them but I wouldn’t have that dilemma ‘cause I go sunny side up.
That said, these days where you can get charged $14 for a couple eggs and some hash browns, I won’t fault anyone for expecting their food to be properly cooked to order.
I agree with how over medium has been characterized in earlier posts by @chela and @pulykamell, and since I make them at home regularly, I also think it’s true that they are tricky to get exactly right.
I used to order eggs over medium in diners, with the particular specification, “No runny whites.” I can’t stand over easy eggs, and the runny whites, sandwiched in between layers of cooked outer whites, are just more than I can cope with at breakfast.
I now order my eggs scrambled in diners.
I used to order mine over easy, but sometimes they weren’t cooked long enough for my taste. Now I order them over medium and generally they’re anywhere from over easy to over hard, and I can handle that spectrum.
Or I order an omelette.
I can handle that spectrum, too – provided there are no runny whites. Even that was asking too much of short order cooks juggling many eggs on the grill, so I just gave up. I like scrambled ok. 
I would expect the whites set, and the yolk runny… because I would order over-easy, and never over-medium. 
Over easy is supposed to have fully cooked whites, that’s the chief difference between over easy and sunny side up. In my experience, it usually does. But I’m more tolerant of a little runny white than i am of over-cooked yolk.
I agree, but they didn’t get that message in the several diners I frequent in my area.
A skilled short order cook is worth their weight in platinum, so far as I’m concerned! And they are very rare.
Also, at a lot of places, if you order over-easy, you’re likely to get sunny-side-up (no flipping, put a lid over it while it’s cooking), because it gives a similar effect, but with much less risk of breaking yolks.