OK, this will probably be old news to most of you, but I was rather pleased to discover how to cook scrambled eggs in a stainless steel pan without them sticking! Note: This is not a thread for debating the merits of stainless vs non-stick vs cast iron pans!

The three pictures below are the before, during, and after shots.

Always in the past, when I have scrambled eggs, I have ended up with part of them vulcanized so thoroughly to the inside of the pan that I would have to let the pan soak in soapy water at least overnight, sometimes longer. Whatever the opposite of a gourmet cook might be... that's me, so this new procedure was something of a revelation.

Thoroughly pre-scramble the eggs in a bowl just before adding them to the pan. Then memorize the mantra: Hot pan, cold oil. Heat the empty pan to where a drop of water rolls around in the pan like a frictionless ball bearing. Immediately pour the pre-scrambled eggs into the pan, and... leave them the hell alone for a little while. Resist absolutely the urge to stir and scramble them in the pan. Don't do it. Put your hands in your pockets, leave the room if you have to.

When the eggs have cooked to where the edges are starting to turn white (photo #2), carefully slide a spatula under them and gently fold them over. Don't stir them and scramble them, the object is to avoid having the wet eggs touch the bare metal (i.e., below the layer of oil) of the pan. Keep turning and folding them until they are cooked to the consistency you prefer.

Now, you can literally pour them out of the pan, and your pan should look like photo #3.

I know, you guys are probably laughing at my ignorance and naiveté (I mean how hard can it be to cook an egg!) but I thought it was pretty neat.

tanstaafl.

Years ago when I worked at Bob Evans they had steel grills and then got in a chromed grill. It was way easy to clean at the end of the night. You’d just put water and some powder on it and it would wipe clean. The steel grills you had to wire brush it and scrub it with some steel wool.

However I don’t think the food tasted as good on the chromed grill.

Man I hated restaurant work!

My eggs never stick, I just keep them moving and most of the cooking is done off the heat.

Is that really scrambled eggs ? It looks more like an omelette in the picture.

Agreed. He's made an omelette. I imagine it's pretty greasy, too. Egg cooking oil needs to be butter. I've never had eggs made with vegetable or fruit oils that were any good at all.

That said, in my experience, the number one reason for eggs sticking is cooking them over too high a heat. I think we all have a tendency to want to make the stove way too hot. Whenever I cook eggs now, I set the temp to a quarter of the way up, at most. Honestly, I think the lower you set it, the better it will be, but there's a definite tradeoff between quality and time. I don't think many people would choose marginally better eggs if they took 20 minutes to cook.

We used to dump ice on the grills while they were still hot and scrubbed with a scotch brite. It was actually pretty fast and easy you just had to wear long gloves as to not get burned.

Yep. This. Eggs cook at a really low temperature -- you can cook them by stirring them into warm pasta in a cabonara, for example. Just turn the temperature down and keep them moving.

Then add a little grated cheese at the end. Season to taste.

I agree with all of this. We cook our eggs in a stainless steel pan and don't have sticking issues anymore, and they turn out a lot better.

We've also, like you, been cooking at lower heat for many cooking purposes. The primary one being when we cook with cast iron. After posting the question here about cleaning cast iron, one of the suggestions was that we were cooking at too-high heat, and that was absolutely right. Since then, we've never turned the heat on our cast iron pans up more than half way. Even half way can burn some foods.

No. He hasn't.

I tried it your way, keeping the heat really low and scrambling the eggs in the pan. I had to soak that pan for two days while scrubbing it intermittently to remove the detritus. Thanks, but I'll stick to my hot-pan-cold-oil mantra. I've seen it explained that pre-heating the pan before adding the oil "...opens the pores in the metal and allows the oil to penetrate, reducing the tendency to stick." Sounds bogus to me, but all I can say is... it works.

I cleaned the pan shown in the photo by wiping it with a soapy sponge.

tanstaafl.

If you want to get scientific about it, you can measure the surface temperature of your pan with a handy dandy IR temperature gun (hat tip: Alton Brown), giving you the sort of precision that recipes which call for "medium heat" will simply never deliver.

I just got one and I'm hoping to sort out the precise conditions under which my crêpes either come loose right away or stick to the pan. Temperature definitely plays a part here. Also, my first crêpe *always* sticks to the pan, while subsequent ones don't, implying perhaps there's some transfer of butter (and/or egg, flour) from crêpe #1 to the pan that's helping subsequent ones.

Um. Don't they have Teflon pans in Mexico?

Yes. They do. And if you do a bit of research about the health effects of hot Teflon, you'll never cook with one again.

tanstaafl.

You can also do scrambled eggs in the microwave, though maybe anyone who's teflon-phobic is also at risk of being microwave-phobic.

I also can't come up with better wording for your depicted egg product than the one in that article: "The folding and resting method raised the same comment each time - they tasted OK but they were not scrambled eggs. They were something like a cross between an omelette and scrambled eggs."

Peter

Scrambled eggs in the microwave isn't really scrambled eggs though. The teflon thing's been going on for decades hasn't it?

Most impressive technique on the eggs tanstaafl, I will try it.

That's a well-known truism, to the point that many crepe recipes/instructions just tell you to expect to throw away the first one.

Truism aside, damnit, I'm going to figure out why.

I know nothing about cooking crepes (I'm not even sure what a crepe is) so this is probably all wrong... but is it possible that my "mantra" of hot pan/cold oil would work here for the first crepe?

I don't know why, but heating the [stainless steel] pan before oiling, even to a temperature higher than you will use to cook, does seem to work.

tanstaafl.

A crêpe is basically a flat pancake made from batter that's a bit runnier than regular pancake batter. You then put stuff inside (ham, grated cheese, and a raw egg is very traditional) fold it up, and serve. It's the ultimate French street food.

The pros have teflon-coated griddles with thermostatically controlled electric heating elements. I'm using a cast iron "pizza pan" over my gas stove. The relevant variables I can control are pan temperature (thus, the acquisition of a new IR temperature gun) and what sort of lubrication is on the pan (either that I add explicitly, or that's leftover from the previous crêpe... did I mention that there's a ton of butter in crêpe batter?).

Have you seen the previous discussion regarding using flax seed oil, and only flax seed oil, to season the cast iron surface?

Multi-step process to do the flax seed oil seasoning, but then it lasts for quite some time.

Yup, that's very much on my to-do list if/when I get a significant block of free time to pull it off.

I had scrambled eggs for lunch and thought of you