Can we talk about cooking eggs in a cold pan? A line cook in Austin flipped my thinking on it
I always started eggs in a hot pan with butter because that is how I was trained, and I figured a cold start would just give me rubber. Last month a line cook in Austin mentioned he drops his eggs into a cold nonstick with a knob of butter and lets it come up slow over low heat, around 4 minutes total. I tried it on a quiet Tuesday brunch and the curds came out softer than anything I get from a hot pan, no browning at all. Took me three tries to stop pulling them too early, but now I get it. Anyone else running cold starts on their eggs, or is this just a brunch service thing?
The "lets it come up slow over low heat" part is the whole thing right there. If you rush that ramp up you lose the soft curds and might as well go back to a hot pan. What took me a while was learning to stir almost the whole time instead of letting them sit, because the second you stop moving them the bottom sets and you get that rubbery layer. Once I got the stir going I started pulling the pan off the heat way before they look done, since they keep cooking from the leftover heat. The one downside is timing, four minutes is a long time when you got other stuff going, so now I just do them last and let the plate wait on the eggs instead of the other way around.