It’s the weekend! I have time and energy to try things and some of those things will be from The Food Lab.
I read Mariam’s entry on fried eggs and decided that it was just different enough from how I do mine to make a fun comparison.
I don’t eat eggs.
But I am the main cook for my family and everyone else does eat eggs plus we got some nice fresh eggs from our CSA and I was going to do some anyway.
The most startling difference was that early step of straining the egg before frying.
On the first egg the yoke broke and I got zero white dripping through.
On the 2nd I was more gentle and was rewarded with the predicted result.
1 point for reproducibility.
I feel like this is a strange step. It seems to result in a more uniform shape but that isn’t something my family seemed to care about.
Here is the 2nd egg being more predictable.
The next difference is that the book wants the pan to be 300 degrees.
This is quite a bit cooler in temperature than I normally fry.
I had to do a fair bit of fiddling to get down to the right temp.
Another issue is that I was also making biscuits and gravy and veggie sausage links simultaneously and the griddle which is perfect for multi foods is not great for tilting to pool oil.
Here you can see the broken yoke very clearly.
Due to the lower temp and a the white straining these eggs were whiter, springier and far less crispy than expected.
If they hadn’t been called crispy fried eggs I wouldn’t have noticed.
The author is fond of a very runny (really pretty much raw) yoke.
I find that kinda gross but I have a couple of ‘eggs and soldiers’ eaters here who don’t mind it.
There was also a drain-off on paper towel that was strange to me and felt more cosmetic than necessary.
My son is a teenager and asked for 3 more eggs after this so I have a fair control group ready to hand. His 3rd egg was covered in feta so I won’t post it.
You can see the lacy edges (unstrained) here.
And results from the higher heat and more typical (for my kitchen) over hard style.
This was fun.
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