- Today in the test kitchen,
we're showing you our
favorite ways to make eggs.
- Can you put it in your own natural way?
- That was my natural way.
[upbeat music]
- Oh god I'm nervous.
[upbeat music]
- That's the best way to make an egg.
- Eggs are one of my
favorite things to eat.
- I probably eat like eggs
practically every day.
- Eggs are nutritious, delicious.
- Just so versatile.
- Instant meal.
- Such a quick and easy way
to have like protein, fat.
- They're very important to me.
- In the morning I want my eggs.
I want 'em quick and I also want 'em in a
breakfast taco.
I'm gonna do really high
heat scrambled eggs.
Simple, easy you can do it
half asleep in the morning,
as I do.
Slice some scallions.
I like just a little bit
of scallion cause it gives
you like sharpness.
Next up, avocado.
Be careful when you do this.
Let's get our eggs going.
I'm just gonna do two eggs.
When you're stirring your eggs,
you wanna make sure
that you are being firm,
but gentle.
All right we're looking good.
If you're making scrambled eggs,
salt goes in there first.
That way every single bite is seasoned
and it tastes delicious.
Get this pan over medium heat.
Actually we're gonna go medium-high heat.
A little bit of olive oil in there
and then the scallions
that I was talking about.
We're not gonna caramelize these,
just get 'em cooked through,
sweat 'em out a little bit.
Let our pan heat up to a really high heat
and then throw our eggs in.
In the meantime,
we're gonna toast a couple tortillas.
Direct contact to the flame.
I want like a nice char on them.
So that pan's super hot.
This we're gonna be constantly stirring,
but like big broad strokes.
The eggs are gonna be ready in probably
like 15 seconds.
[pan sizzling]
All right, take it off the
heat before they're finished.
But see look,
we have those like big folded curds
instead of those tiny little soft curds.
This is gonna go right in there
and then we're gonna do avocado,
little bit of lime juice
and a little bit of
Cholula green cause that's
my favorite hot sauce.
Not dry at all,
super quick cooked eggs,
creamy texture, fat, acid.
It's all there.
I'm gonna make these for
breakfast tomorrow morning.
- So I'm gonna make really really really
soft scrambled eggs,
the way that I grew up eating eggs.
My dad's not French,
but it's like a very frenchie sort of,
just really low and slow,
a lot of stirring.
Non-stick pan,
which is really important
for eggs like these.
Gonna put this on just really low heat.
We're using three eggs.
You wanna beat these eggs
really really really well,
so they're fully fully incorporated.
You don't want to see any streaks of white
or yolk in there.
A pinch of salt in there.
Gonna take about three
tablespoons of this butter.
It's a lot of butter,
that's a tablespoon per egg
and we're gonna put a little
bit more in too at the end.
And so we're just pretty
much gonna wait until
this butter is melted and
just when it starts to foam.
So you know there are like
different schools of thought
when it comes to scrambled eggs.
Some people like a hot and fast scramble.
I prefer kind of like a,
almost like a cottage
cheese texture to my eggs.
So it's like cooking it
really slowly and just
stirring it constantly
you get kind of curds.
All right so we're seeing
like a little bit of bubbling.
I don't need this to
get like totally foamy,
but I'm just gonna start this process.
And you can kinda see that
there are curds starting
to form.
I don't want,
at any point,
the entire bottom to firm up.
We're getting close.
I'm gonna turn the heat off now,
just kind of let the
residual heat cook them the
rest of the way.
Then I'm gonna take
this last bit of butter,
break it into a few pieces,
and let that kind of melt in.
Super soft,
cooks just until the butter melts.
Kinda looks like polenta almost.
And then I just wanna take
a little bit of flaky salt on top.
These can take a fair amount of salt,
just because they're so buttery.
A couple of chives.
Soft scrambled eggs!
Mmm!
Texture is really really soft,
really silky,
tastes like eggs and butter.
It's not eggs cooked with
a little bit of butter,
it's eggs and butter together.
- I'm gonna make some you know little,
I like doing it it's like a mastery,
it's like a little I
find zen in making it,
it's like a buttery French omelet.
Slightly custardy in the center,
that's what we're gonna go for.
Three eggs into the bowl.
Then you're just gonna make 'em nice.
Whisk 'em up real nice.
Feel good about that.
And so I'm gonna make sure my pan's hot.
I put it on a little low,
medium-low.
All right I'm just gonna
start meltin' a little butter
in there and then we'll adjust.
Turn the heat up a little bit,
nice.
All right, butter's our friend.
Okay.
Bang,
I like to bang it.
Gotta pop some of them air bubbles.
I don't know if that does anything,
but it makes me feel good.
So I like to start high and
then turn it off to low.
All right here goes nothing,
no turning back now.
Oh god.
All right we'll do a nice little
cookie cook in the middle.
Right off the bat I'm seeing
a little bit of white still.
Not ideal.
But I think we're gonna be all right.
Wouldn't be the first time
I pissed the French off
you know?
So you wanna get this nice and jammy
and then I like to just
swirl it around too.
That's my trick.
I like to swirl it around the outsides
like a weird little crepe.
Helps it cook quicker too you know,
I'm not foolin' around.
I'm using the pan to cook it.
Oh god I'm nervous.
And then we'll finish it
with a little butter too
to kinda help everything go nice.
Juj juj juj.
A quick little release on the outsides.
Okay off the heat.
Put a little butter underneath it.
Oh god.
Oh god.
Yeah know?
I'm into it.
I don't know if the French would be,
but it's gonna work out just fine.
It's gonna be tasty.
Boom.
There's your Brad omelet.
Yeah and just do a
little bit of salt on it.
Maybe a little pepper I don't care.
The moment of truth.
Yeah I'm all right with that,
you know?
It ain't perfect,
but neither am I,
but look it ain't overcooked.
It's not burned by any means,
no browning,
custardy, uniform.
Ah!
- I love poached eggs.
Always have, always will.
People think they're hard,
they're not hard.
There's no frying,
there's no splattering,
there's no sunny side upping.
You just get like a
beautifully cooked situation.
I'm gonna crack two,
even though I might only need one.
Doing more than two in the
same pot of water though
is kind of a challenge.
I have a pot of boiling water over here.
This is extra,
but I'm gonna make a vortex,
which when you drop the egg
in is just gonna help it
have a nice round shape.
So it'll hit there and
kind of swirl around
instead of just sinking flat.
This'll be pretty effective
with the first one,
but a little bit harder to
pull off for the second.
I'm gonna get the other guy in here.
You can see all of those
strands of egg white
is normal.
The egg white is setting
and it's just a different
texture and consistency
than the yolk.
It's not a big deal,
it's not gonna affect like
the way your egg tastes,
but it will affect the way that it looks.
So I would get rid of any
of those strandy bits.
Kind of gives it this like octopus vibe.
I don't put vinegar in the water,
I don't think it really
does what people say
that it does,
and it also can give your egg kind of a
sour flavor,
which I don't really care for.
I'm taking these out.
So I just put it on the paper towel.
The best way to enjoy a poached egg
is on an English muffin.
Everybody knows that.
And then here's my egg.
Okay this is my perfect
poached egg and English muffin.
See perfect!
Yolk runneth over.
- My ideal thing is to basically,
you know it's a fried egg,
so you get to set those
whites into kinda lacy,
crispy edges.
That really kind of makes the egg to me as
delicious as possible.
So when you guys weren't looking,
I cranked the heat on this thing,
so that we'd walk over to a hot skillet.
So this is olive oil.
I'm using a generous amount.
See how it's smoking?
That's exactly what I want.
[sizzling pan]
Like all the best cooking,
there is a little bit of
an element of danger here.
You know the water content of the white
is going to throw off you know,
some sort of spattering.
This is more of a back
pocket spoon kind of deal.
You want like a big spoon to baste with,
and at this point,
I like to kind of separate the two eggs
just so that we have
like two distinct eggs
as opposed to one mono-egg.
See how like already that
laciness is starting to happen?
I'm just gonna use a little
bit of the oil to baste
the white to make it set.
I find like this can go
so fast that I don't even
bother to lower the heat.
I just take the eggs off of the heat.
Yeah so this is it.
The whites are incredibly crispy,
lacy and set.
The yolk is still plenty oozy and jammy.
This is the kind of egg that
I want most of the time frankly.
I'm all about this like,
you know all that crackly crispiness,
I'm here for it.
You can't argue with that.
- I just wanna say that
Emile stole my favorite way
to make eggs,
which is soft scramble.
So then I had to go
with my second favorite,
which is a medium boil.
So I love a medium boil because
the yolk is not dry,
but it's not so hard to control and like
running all over the place.
All right so this water is boiling.
I like to plunge them in room temp,
not only cause it gives
me a better idea of how
they're gonna cook,
but also because they're
less likely to crack
when they hit the water.
I'll kind of gently
place them in like that.
And then that's it.
Come back in seven minutes.
It's really like six minutes
for a soft boiled egg,
and upwards of eight, nine,
ten minutes for a hard
boiled egg depending on
how dry you like the yolks,
so I think seven minutes
is like a good sweet spot.
And we have a minute.
Okay let's just stand here
for a minute silently.
30 seconds?
- 40.
- 40!
God.
- Now 35.
[sighs]
- Ice baths sometimes I
just do it in the sink
under cold water.
Okay so these are still hot,
but crack them to peel them.
I like to crack all over.
And then I like to get a
little bit of water in there
after I crack it,
cause I feel like the water
gets kind of under that
membrane.
So a pretty good lookin' egg.
It's really,
I can feel it,
it's very wobbly.
Actually that's pretty good,
that's pretty nice.
It's somewhere between a
medium boil and a soft boil.
And then just a little flaky salt.
So the yolk is set everywhere
except for the very center
where it's a little bit runny.
So I actually really like this done-ness.
There's a ring where
it's dry on the outside.
I like that you get all
those different textures.
And most importantly,
the white is set.
Cause I never really want
to eat an egg if the white
isn't set.
It's the world's best breakfast.
- I'm gonna make something
that I call the Molly egg.
Which is basically a fried
egg that gets cooked so
gently in the pan that you
don't develop any color
or any sort of crispiness.
So it's sort of like the
anti-crispy fried egg.
I made that name up
because I used to work at
a restaurant in Brooklyn
called All's Well,
and we had a mushroom
toast on the menu there
and it was this like
thick slice of bread that
was really crispy and was fried,
and then we had mushrooms on top of that,
and I always used to cook
my egg super gently on top,
and so it became known
as the Molly egg there.
Okay so you could use
any kind of fat really.
I'm not gonna use butter,
just because I actually
don't want the milk solids
to brown cause that's gonna impart flavor
and color into the white.
So I'm just gonna do a
little bit of olive oil,
heat it up a little bit,
but I'm not looking to
get this oil ripping hot
by any means.
Cracking right into a
still relatively cold pan.
I'm over medium low heat.
Gonna season my egg with
salt and just let time
do the rest.
You'll see it's very slowly
beginning to turn opaque.
This is different from a fried egg because
the pan is never gonna
get hot enough to develop
any color on the egg or any
sort of lacy crispy edges.
I can see it starting to sputter
a little bit at the edges,
so I'm gonna turn it down.
The end game is a very
liquidy molten yolk.
So we're done.
And then a little bit of pepper.
The Molly egg.
So it's cooked all the way through,
but it's quite floppy and really soft.
The white is very nicely cooked
because it doesn't get
hit hard in the pan.
Very pleasant on the palate.
There's a time and a
place for a crispy egg
and there's a time and
a place for a Molly egg.
- I didn't like eggs for the
majority of my upbringing,
I thought they were really gross.
Basically when I was a kid,
my mom discovered one way
to prepare eggs that we all
really loved.
We realized that what we
didn't like about the eggs
was like was the yolk.
Like the yolk just tasted
so intense and eggy to us.
I know that this is gonna
sound blasphemous to people
cause they're like,
"Oh my god runny yolk it's so great!"
I'm just gonna say it,
I think runny yolks are totally overrated.
If I could only eat eggs one
way for the rest of my life,
it would be chopped up
whites with salt and pepper.
Say what you want,
come at me,
this is just how I feel.
You're just gonna bring
your water to a boil,
add your eggs.
The beauty of this is
because you don't really care
about the yolk,
you're scooping it out,
you don't have to do
that like crazy intense,
like I'm gonna time this
for six and a half minutes
to get a perfectly runny yolk.
Like it's okay,
you can do six minutes,
you can do eight minutes.
All right so my water is boiling.
I'm gonna put these in.
Be careful.
And yeah maybe like seven minutes?
We'll say seven minutes.
So eggs are done,
so we're just gonna take 'em out,
put 'em in an ice bath
for like a hot second,
until they're easier to peel.
Oh my god.
This is such a throwback.
I usually eat yogurt for breakfast,
like I'm not much of an egg eater,
but I'm like I'm so
excited to eat these eggs.
Okay I find peeling eggs very relaxing.
Wow! These are beautiful.
All right so now we're
just gonna halve them.
And then you just scoop this part out.
I was this close to making scrambled eggs,
but I was like,
you know what,
a lot of people have
opinions about scrambling.
You know what people
don't have opinions about?
This dish that my mom I guess made up
and probably doesn't exist in real life.
And now we're literally
just gonna chop these up.
Now for the peppering.
It's like pepper with a side of eggs.
Is the strategy here.
And then salt.
Oh my god.
This is so good.
It's just got like a nice pleasant bounce,
but it's not like gelatinous.
This is a great way to get
like kids to eat breakfast,
but also me to eat breakfast.
- So the way I'm gonna cook
these eggs is I'm gonna fry
them in bacon fat.
Is kind of the more of
the special occasion egg,
in place of a poached egg,
so like if you're gonna make a salad,
this is a way to kind of like
dirty it up a little bit.
So I've got the heat on,
I've got this pan on high.
You really need this pan ripping hot.
I'm gonna use a decent amount of fat.
The egg isn't gonna absorb the fat.
You'll probably get some
of the fat in the little
craggy edges and the egg will bubble up.
Okay so we're smoking,
so I'm going to just crack this.
Move it around a little.
I'm gonna turn that way down.
I'm gonna turn it off now.
And all these little craggy
bits will be a little bit
crunchy which I kind of like.
I'm kinda swooshing up some of
the oil onto the unset white
just to kind of give that
a little helping hand.
I've still got like nice runny yolk.
Ah!
I mean who wouldn't love this breakfast.
I mean there's just bacon and eggs,
very simple,
but it's just a beautiful
crispy yet runny egg.
Just give it a little sprinkle of salt,
crack of pepper.
My really simple,
but really delicious
eggs fried in bacon fat.
Mmm it's amazing how much
of the bacon flavor actually
comes through with the eggs.
It just holds onto that flavor.
It's a really great way to use
up the drippings in your pan.
If you're making bacon for a crowd,
just drop some eggs in there.
It takes literally about a minute.
- So I'm gonna make a
classic French omelet.
I think it's the best way to have an egg
cause it really it's like an entree egg.
You know?
It's a great meal.
You need at least three eggs to get it to
properly roll up for you,
and I'm gonna be doing it in
a six-inch non-stick skillet.
Don't even try this if you
don't have a non-stick,
you're just gonna make yourself sad.
Contrary to what old chefs tell you,
you definitely wanna
season your eggs first.
It's the only way to make
sure it's like totally
seasoned through.
It's not gonna make 'em tough.
That's one of those lies.
Make sure you mix it really well.
The salt makes the proteins un-coagulate,
so it actually makes them more tender.
You don't want any streaks of white.
This takes longer than you think.
So I'm using a six-inch non-stick skillet,
about a tablespoon of butter.
You wanna start it on
like medium, medium-high.
And melt the butter,
and once it's foamy,
I'm gonna turn the heat down to medium-low
and put the eggs in.
I also really like this tiny spatula.
This like angle here
is gonna really help us
get underneath the eggs.
Now our butter is nice and melted,
starting to get a little foamy.
Now I'm gonna turn the
heat down and add our eggs.
So if you can do a nice soft scramble,
you can do an omelet,
cause an omelet is just a scramble
that you set a little bit further.
Once you get your eggs in there
you just wanna vigorously move,
so we get nice small curds.
The good thing about a
French omelet like this too
is it's so creamy that you
don't need cheese or anything.
If you make it right it
tastes like there's a lot
going on.
But it does take a little bit of practice
just to know when the eggs are set,
but you know even if
you don't get it perfect
it's still good and they're eggs.
It's an easy,
cheap technique to practice.
But you can see it's
getting creamier and thicker
and almost like custardy.
That's just what you want.
So now we're getting thicker and thicker,
now we're almost at the
point to stop stirring.
Now you wanna spread it
along the bottom of the pan.
All right I think we're there.
Time to turn it off.
Now we're gonna roll it up.
Start from where your handle is
because you're gonna use the
pan to help you tilt it out,
because it is so fragile and so delicate.
And then once you get it rolled
up two thirds of the way,
and tilt it out of the pan.
Woo!
And here's my French omelet.
It's like totally tender,
just barely set,
no color at all.
A classic French omelet you want no color.
When you cut into it
should be really creamy
on the inside.
Check it out.
It's almost like there's
like cheese in there,
but it's just from the
egg being nice and saucy,
so it's super tender.
It's the perfect egg.
The perfect entree egg,
all you need is a salad.
