QFT. I once stopped at the Bluebird Cafe in Hopland CA and ordered a bog-standard Swiss cheese and Ortega Chile omelet. OMG. It was literally the best tasting omelet I’d ever eaten. I couldn’t figure it out at first. It couldn’t just be because it was made with butter. Finally, it came to me. I was just up the road from Santa Rosa the hen and egg capital of California. Duh. They were probably the freshest eggs I’d ever eaten.
Oh, and today I’m having egg salad sandwiches. Yum!
To be clear, I DO NOT like my food overcooked/well-done.
Again, you can have your food any way you like it but if I take you to a good steakhouse and you order a well done steak I am never taking you out for a steak ever again.
Truly the best use of a hard boiled egg. So yummy! I am still on the hunt for the perfect egg salad sandwich. I have actually made some effort to figure this out but I haven’t tried very hard.
Yes, indeedy.
Easy-peasy scrambled eggs: whisk two or three eggs in a bowl till yolk and whites are blended. Add a small dollop of soy sauce. Whisk to stir in.
Heat a glob of garlic and herb butter in a no-stick pan till melted. Pour the egg in and gently stir and fold from all sides until just done through.
Sure, go ahead and saute chopped shallots or whatever if you like before you add the egg.
Easier peasier: skip the bowl & pre whisking.
Do the garlic first, then add soy sauce then quickly break the eggs into the pan, work them briskly with your spatula.
Faster to make and less than half the cleanup. That’s a win in my book. YMMV.
Working as a line cook, I made my eggs quick as i could.
But there is this famous recipe-
If you’re dumping a cup of light cream and half a stick of butter into six eggs, I’m not sure what you’re making but I will assume it doesn’t taste like any scrambled eggs I’ve ever made.
Somewhere I have a copy of The Nero Wolfe Cookbook, from which that recipe is taken. It collects recipes from all the books. I’ve made some of them, although I never tried the 45 minute scrambled eggs.
Poached can be tricky. But soft boiled is really easy. Someone gave me a magic egg timer (it’s shaped like an egg, and goes into the pot of water with the eggs, and plays a tune when the eggs are soft boiled, a different tune for medium, and a third tune for hard boiled) but before that i just worked out the timing with eggs from my fridge on my stove. I like soft boiled eggs on toast, because there’s almost no clean up. The plate goes in the weather, and the pot can just be rinsed out, as there really wasn’t anything touching it but hot water.
I agree in the sense that eggs taste like eggs, and different textures/preparations are about preference, despite what TV and online chefs would have you think.
That said, eggs that get cooked too dry/rubbery have less flavor- it is possible to overcook eggs. But you can make a fine “American style” omelet or egg scramble without overdoing it.
Well, this thread gave me a nudge yesterday.
I can make eggs damn near any way someone wants them: Free style poached, water basted, fat basted, scrambled soft or hard to preference, omelets, hard boiled, soft boiled, shirred – you name it, I can cook it. Except… I had never, ever made or even attempted over easy eggs.
What you get when you order over easy at a restaurant is almost always disappointing. Either the yolks are overcooked, or the whites are underdone. I detest uncooked whites and over easy at a restaurant is always a crap shoot for that.
But we live in the age of Youtube, so I thought, what the hell. I’ll watch and learn.
I overcooked them a bit, but I learned a lot! I probably won’t make them often, because it’s just easier to water steam the tops and get them just right for yolk runniness. But I’m glad to have learned something new. I’m sure I’ll do them a few more times just to perfect the technique.
Thanks for the inspiration!
Getting a carbon steel frying pan let me make over easy eggs successfully for the first time. They stick too much to stainless.
Yeah, the Youtube vid I watched strongly recommended non-stick, so I used that. It worked great. Sticking wasn’t a problem. I just waited too long before putting the over into the easy. 
Yeah. the former top side wants to be on the bottom very briefly. It’s not quite flip, set pan on stove, take pan off stove, flip, and slide onto the plate. But it’s close.
I’ve never been able to do the ‘over easy’ flip without the darn things breaking, myself.
The secret for me is to have a cover on top of the frying pan for about the last 90 seconds.
Timing is critical….
I trust the tunes are “Killing Me Softly” and “Hard Day’s Night” on the extreme ends. For Medium, maybe "Stuck In the Middle”?
Anyway are we just not gonna talk about Ayo Edibiri sieving her eggs? I’ve never seen that or heard of that till now. Yet I too hate those little gummy clumps, and try to pick them out with a fork.
Sadly, no. They are:
Oh Susanna (soft)
Take me out to the ballgame (medium)
Hail, Hall, the gang’s all here (hard)
My husband thinks they picked a song with an “s” in the name for soft, and with an “h” in the name for hard. I think they just picked well-known public domain tunes.
Are you sure it’s not “With Cat-Like Tread”?
The big trick there is that your motion with the pan is not upwards. It’s away from you. If you’re tossing the eggs upwards, they’ll break when they come back down. The way chefs are depicted flipping eggs in cartoons is all wrong.
My technique: gently swirl the pan so you’re certain the eggs are sliding freely, not stuck anywhere. Push the pan away from you quickly, but not so quickly the eggs slosh back towards you. They want to ride centered in the pan away from you. Then abruptly stop the pan or pull it backwards a smidgen so the eggs’ inertia keeps them going and they slide up the side of the pan. Maybe a teeny upward flip with the pan at the very end as half or more of the eggs are going vertical out of the pan. But the motion is 95% horizontal, maybe 5% vertical.
Then as the eggs are finishing flipping and starting to fall, which is only an instant later, move the pan a bit farther away from you to center the pan under where the eggs are going to fall. Now lower the pan so the falling eggs gently catch up to the slightly slower-falling pan.
It’s hard to describe the motion completely without using way too many words and making it sound super complex. But it only takes a few flips to get the idea, and then it’s just muscle memory. And not trying to force it if the eggs are sticking. You can’t flip sticking eggs wo a mess. Get them loose w a spatula, more grease, whatever. Then flip.
One other non-pro tip: Always flip your eggs over the kitchen sink. You’re gonna miss a few, especially at first. You’ll know when you’re good enough not to take that precaution. But as long as they stay mostly in the pan the results of a failed flip are still plenty edible; just not pretty.