![]() Heed this warning from McGee, though, especially if liquid is your fat medium of choice: "Additional liquid ingredients (cream, milk, stock, water) dilute the egg proteins and give a softer result, but also are more sensitive to overcooking and leaking watery juices." So don't overdo it.Are your scrambled eggs not up to scratch? Not to worry, you’re probably making the same mistakes as everybody else. Not an everyday meal, but definitely illustrative of the concept. Between that and the constant stirring, these were the richest, most luxurious and filling – I didn't eat again for many hours! – eggs I'd ever made. Toklas, I added a whopping three tablespoons of diced butter to four eggs. Inspired by Nosrat's mention of a recipe from writer Alice B. To account for slightly backing off the dairy fat, Souza incorporates two egg yolks, which also boosts the egg flavour and colour. Souza preferred the in-between zone of equal amounts of cream and milk (¼ cup per eight eggs). Thickened cream is particularly rich as well. Even fattier ingredients are possibilities and will lead to denser, creamier results. If you've always automatically beaten some milk into your eggs without thinking about it, you're on to something. Fat is another way to encourage tenderness and interfere with the bonding of proteins. They were some delightfully fluffy eggs.Īdd prawns to your scramble with William MeppemĪdd fat (or don't). I shook just long enough to bring the eggs together and then took extra care to not overcook them in the skillet. ![]() Given what I already knew, I was a little skeptical of the method, but I tried it anyway, albeit with a lidded jar. ![]() Food52 contributor Alyssa Walker recently wrote about how she likes to combine her eggs for scrambling in a cocktail shaker. You can, within reason, get the proteins to work in your favour. That's why he prefers to beat the eggs with a fork, as opposed to a whisk, just until they come together. As Souza notes, beating eggs too much before scrambling actually encourages the proteins to start the process of unfolding and then coming together, which is exactly what you don't want before the cooking even begins. Or you can go extra gentle with a double-boiler situation, with a bowl set over a saucepan of simmering water.ĭecide how much you want to shake things up. Using a saucepan, too, helps keep moisture from evaporating as much. In Cook's Illustrated, Dan Souza found that a combination of high and low heat helped achieve voluminous but still tender eggs – start at medium-high and drop to low once a spatula dragged through the skillet left very little raw egg in the trail.įor denser eggs with few or almost no curds, work entirely over low heat. If you like fluffy curds, you need heat to produce steam and cause the eggs to expand. But playing around with heat also gives you control over what style of scrambled eggs you want. And the biggest danger in scrambled eggs is too much heat, which, as we've established, leads to unappealing textures. "The key to most good egg dishes is temperature control," McGee writes. Like salt, acid affects the way proteins bond, in this case affecting the speed and density at which they coagulate. Similarly, in Salt Fat Acid Heat, Samin Nosrat suggests "a few secret drops of lemon juice" in scrambled eggs. My eggs have gone from blah to, wouldn't you know, well-seasoned! From a taste perspective alone, I have found that adding a little more salt than my instincts would tell me has made a marked improvement in flavour. When you want actual curds (whether dense and creamy or light and fluffy), consider dropping the size to 25 or even 20 centimetres, depending on how many eggs you're cooking. The greater surface area, though, means it's all too easy for the eggs to dry out quickly. My 30-centimetre non-stick frypan is great for when I want a very thin omelette for folding onto a sandwich. One of the easiest ways to guard against overcooking is using a smaller pan. The coating of a non-stick skillet provides a smooth surface and separates the food from the metal. Provost, who co-wrote The Science of Cooking: Understanding the Biology and Chemistry Behind Food and Cooking, explained that when a pan is heated, the metal expands, which means eggs can get trapped in those microscopic cracks, where they then stick and burn.
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