Despite the less-than-impressive results, I’m not ashamed to say that over the past six or seven weekends, I’ve made a pretty goddamn valiant effort to make a sort of bagel sandwich for breakfast–one with like a fried egg, and melted cheese, and, if I’m feeling particularly ambitious, some avocado slices. I’ve failed fantastically pretty much every time. I almost set off my apartment’s fire alarm on Saturday morning. It occurs to me that I should probably note that I’m really good at making exactly four types of food.
1) Macaroni and cheese
2) Cold cereal
3) Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches
4) Apples
You don’t see stupid bagel/egg sandwiches up there because out of the past six or seven weekends, I’ve managed to not fuck up frying an egg exactly once, and I think that was just a fluke, as I have no idea how I managed to pull it off. In other words: I don’t know what I’m doing, and I kind of need some help here, and I’d appreciate it if someone who, unlike me, has even the most basic culinary competence can give me a little bit of advice on the matter. Not so much because I actually want to eat one of these fabled, possibly imaginary homemade bagel/egg sandwiches at this point–no, now I pretty much fucking hate the things, just on principle and out of spite–but because I’m sick of my apartment reeking like burned eggs.
So for the first few weeks I was cooking on some battered, ancient frying pan with cancer-y flakes of Teflon that got scraped up into the eggs every time I tried to flip them. This past weekend, blaming the pan for my previous failures, I went to Ikea and dropped $20 on a new frying pan, one that’s hopefully sans cancer. Said frying pan is already ruined, with cooked-on olive oil like fossilized on there, as well as an irremovable streak of burned-on plastic, because yes, I also ruined the spatula, somehow melting it and, in the process, smearing tarry streaks of molten plastic into my latest culinary opus.
Maybe I’m getting ahead of myself. Here’s how I’ve been trying to fry eggs. Maybe there’s a really important step I’m missing or something.
1) Put a little bit of olive oil into the frying pan
2) Heat up the frying pan on like medium hot. Wait until I can feel the heat coming off of it
3) Drop an egg in
4) Wait for it to look kind of cooked on one side before flipping it over
5) Flip it over
6) Wait for that side to look kind of cooked
7) Hope for the best
Usually at the second step, I fuck up and shit starts smoking and I have to start over before there’s even an egg in the pan. Usually at the fourth step I realize I don’t actually know what it should look like when it’s done. Step five always, always results in the yolk breaking, and a burst of yellow oozing over the pan. Step six is usually rushed, out of anger and hunger. Step seven is always a disappointment. And it might have made me kind of sick this weekend.
I always end up eating these abominations–even the one that, in hindsight, probably contained a fair amount of melted spatula–and I don’t know why. Stubbornness, I guess.
Anyway: Help, please. Simple instructions on frying an egg would be so, so appreciated right now. Otherwise fuck it and I’m going back to cold cereal.
Sir:
The correct syntax for your headline is “I’m Just Trying to Fucking Fry Some Eggs Here.”
It’s not the eggs that are fucked up. It’s your attempt to fry them. Even the vernacular has its proper structure.
I remain your humble if picky servant,
Jacomus
You need this:
http://machinist.salon.com/blog/2007/12/18/egg_muffin_maker/
But a better, non-toxic non-stick pan would probably be good too. And a lid is also nice (steams the eggs at the finish, then you don’t have to flip it at all)
butter, use butter. it always works
Start with a non-stick pan + tablespoon of butter.
Heat just shy of medium until butter is melted.
Swirl butter around until entire cooking surface is coated.
Crack egg into pan & cook till desired level of done-ness (I break the yolk & wait until the whites are nearly cooked through before flipping).
Salt & pepper the uncooked side of egg just before flipping.
Flip it (any wide flat non-metal spatula will do), set a slice of cheese on it, cover with lid & turn off burner.
Egg should be cooked and cheese nicely melted within a couple minutes.
Non stick pans suck. Use butter. Use steel. Or cast-iron. Just use a lower temp and don’t mess with the egg until you are ready to flip or extract. Or just poach it, it’s healthier and easier.
Yeah, poached is the way to go when making breakfast bagel sandwiches. But using olive oil there is your first mistake and waiting until it’s hot enough to then cook immediately is another. What you’re attempting to do is fry/cook an egg, and what you’re accidentally doing is sautee’ing it. Follow rico’s advice, very simple, very good directions there.
Lower heat and more patience are the key to perfect eggs of any sort. A mixture of equal parts butter and olive oil in the pan tastes good and keeps the butter from burning. Best of luck.
You might just need a new pan. That one appears to suck strongly.
B acon F at.
low heat
better tasting
worse off
First of all, Erik, have you found someplace that makes good bagels? Second, a George Forman grill makes excellent bagel sandwiches (and many other wonderful vegetarian delights). You can also buy a sandwich maker, but single purpose appliances are so “Wall Street” (the Oliver Stone movie, not the actual place).
Answer: A well-seasoned cast iron skillet.
You will carry it for life. A weapon, a cooking utensil and a valuable source of iron, the gnarly black sonofabitch will last longer than any of your friends or lovers. Mine did.
Use exactly one pat of butter on a skillet that has been heated to the wussy side of medium. When the pat melts, crack the egg and wait till the edges of the egg (not just the underneath) turn white, then flip and turn off the heat. The skillet will keep cooking the egg just fine. After the yolk reaches the desired squishiness (1-2 minutes) remove the egg to your presumably unburned bagel. Voila! An egg sammy fit for Gambit, or possibly Power Man.
This is making me hungry.
Not to be horrible and negative, but hay-zeus, didn’t your mother or parent teach you how to cook a simple egg? I know I won’t be there forever for my boys, but at least I taught them to not burn water, or an egg. Did mom/parent at least teach you how to change oil or a flat on a car? If you do bike, you still need to know how to change a flat.
It is a parent’s job to teach the child how NOT TO NEED THE PARENT- or how to be self-sufficient.
I you are burning eggs (possibly one of the simplest things to cook in the world), I would recommend avoiding cast iron skillets for now, they are awesome but they take some skill to maintain (never use soap, it will ruin the seasoning) and perhaps when your culinary skills improve, you could take that step. Personally, I’ve been using cast iron for well over a decade now and couldn’t live without them.
Okay, the problem is probably one of two things: Perhaps your heat is set too high. Do you have a gas or an electric range? gas heats up faster and is easy to eyeball and adjust by flame level, whereas electric, it’s all about the dial setting. Make sure your pan has heated (but not smoking), a good way to tell is if you use oil, the oil will run really easily and coat the pan completely. If your pan is too hot the oil will smoke, in which case, you should let it cool, remove the oil and start again. A good fried egg requires relatively high heat and a relatively short cooking time. If the egg doesn’t start sizzling as soon as it hits the pan, your pan is not hot enough.
The other possibility is you are impatient and leave the room to watch cartoons, forgetting your eggs, which proceed to burn.
You might consider signing up for a cooking class. Mostly cooking is common sense and a few basic skills but can be a little scary if you really haven’t done it before.
I don’t generally advocate microwaving anything, but in the case of the bagel sandwich, I make an exception.
Beat the egg in a microwave-safe bowl, then nuke for ~ 1 min. Voila, and, depending on the bowl, a great size for a bagel.
Oh, I say, chappies. First Matt posts the least interesting news in several weeks then this. I’m going out for coffee and a gnosh. Doing this job is bloody awful most days. But on an empty stomach it’s more than a man can endure. Think I’ll put in for another medal.
I make myself a fried egg (or two) for breakfast every day. I used to fuck it up occasionally, but now I’m pretty much a master at it.
Here’s my routine: I put a non-stick 6″ fry pan on medium heat (6 on my electric cooktop) with a dime-sized amount of butter in the center. I let it heat up while I do my hair, probably two minutes. When I get back, the pan’s heated and the butter’s melted. I crack an egg into the middle, where the butter is.
Here’s where you can make it SO MUCH EASIER on yourself: put a lid on the pan. This will create an oven effect, cooking the top of the yolk and eliminating the need to flip the egg.
While the egg is cooking, I’ll pack my bag for work and maybe wash a dish or two from the previous night’s dinner, maybe four minutes. Don’t take the lid off and on a bunch of times, it’ll let the heat out. Poke the yolk with your finger to tell when it’s done. This, obviously, will depend on how runny you like your yolks. Trial and error will show you what the perfect consistency feels like, but if you want a bagel and egg sandwich without a bunch of yolk spewing out when you bite into it, you’ll probably want the yolk to look relatively light in color, and not wobble when you poke it.
Long story short: non-stick pan with lid, medium heat, butter, and don’t fuck with it.
It’s only incidental to your egg quest, but the product you need to clean that pan is called Bar Keeper’s Friend, which consists mostly of oxalic acid. It completely changed my relationship with my All-Clad pans, which are now easy enough to get 100% clean that I’m much more willing to use them. Available in any megamart, dirt cheap. Thank me later.
Also, yes, use butter, and make sure the pan is hot enough to make droplets of water dance and boil off.
Gosh. Everyone sure knows a lot about cooking eggs.
If an All-Clad pan was involved this thread presumably would not exist.
And there’s no reason you can’t still fry an egg easily in olive oil or even spray (I’m partial to Trader Joe’s canola).
For a sandwich, egg rings aren’t a bad concept either.
Jacomus,
If you’re going to be such a grammar nut, then look up the meaning of split infinitive.
SCG:
The transformational grammar of the vernacular allows one to split an infintive.
However, point well taken.
Thank you.
Jacomus
P.S. I am officious and pedantic, not as you so quaintly put it, a “grammar nut.” There is a qualitative difference.
Jason: pish-posh. All-Clad has its place, I’m not knocking it, but it’s no panacea for eggs. Nor is it any less hellaciously hard to clean than any other stainless steel (especially when used while not quite hot enough), short of the aforementioned oxalic acid.
Jacomus, go look up adverbs, too. Even in the vernacular, your revision is wrong. A person can’t “fucking fry” something the way he could “quickly fry” something. But he can fry fucking eggs. Those are the only kind of eggs I fry, actually. The fucking kind.
Nat, all I really meant by that is you can solve a lot of problems with a good piece of cookware that conducts heat properly. I suspect that if you put Erik’s Ikea pan up against your All-Clad one would find you do get what you pay for.
And for me a non-stick All-Clad (or Caphalon, that’s actually what I use) is pretty close to a panacea, and a cinch to clean for as long as it holds up (and yes, they recommend only using Barkeeper’s Friend to clean). Nonstick only sucks if it’s a sucky pan to begin with (and so long as you don’t scratch it). I only use mine for eggs and omelettes.
Lose the plastic spatula too (though it appears you already melted it). Use metal utensils with metal pans and plastic with non-stick.
But the bottom line (literally) the pans too hot.
Latinate grammars are outre’.
But thank you for your assistance in this matter.
Jacomus
Latinate grammars are outre’.
But thank you for your assistance in this matter.
Jacomus