The Eggs Files

--- Day changed Thu Jun 23 2016
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01:15 <S*****> Do any of you have a preference or skill for making fried eggs with the yolks cooked solid? I want to step up my egg-frying game (mine are often too crispy or rubbery :/ ), but the internet seems to be full of conflicting reports of "what works".
01:16 <j**> S*****: I do. I always pierce the yolk with the egg-lifter right after Deploying it.
01:16 <j**> That prevents it from remaining liquid inside.
01:19 <S*****> What kind of heat/pan-prep do you use?
01:21 <j**> S*****: I heat the pan until such time as dropping an egg into it, after pouring in a bit of oil, will caused an audible frying sound, but no longer than that.
01:22 <j**> I think that's about halfway before the oil starts smoking, but that may very depending on the apparatus.
01:22 <j**> *vary
01:23 <j**> I have been told by other people that I'm a Pleb for eating hard-fried eggs, but I don't care.
01:24 <S*****> Yeah, people tend to look down on the hard-fried egg types.
01:24 <S*****> So you kill the heat completely when the egg hits the pan?
01:24 <j**> Oh, no, I leave the heat on. I mean that I don't wait any longer than that before deploying the egg.
01:25 <j**> I think the consequences of doing that would be that the egg would be browned on the outside but not properly* cooked inside, and you'd risk burning it if you left it after that.
01:25 <j**> *according to my taste
01:25  * S***** nods.
01:26 <j**> If you're going to do multiple rounds of egg-frying, it might get more complicated, because the pan might be hotter afterwards - and maybe then turning down the heat is appropriate.
01:26 <S*****> I thought that was a bit curious, but there are people who say you should lower the heat quite a bit when the egg finally gets on there. If I was cooking with cast iron, I could see killing it completely as being viable.
01:31 <S*****> Just to make sure I'm understanding... You put oil in the pan as it heats, and when it sizzles you add the egg?
01:32 <S*****> Is it enough to submerge the egg completely? I hear that's how they do it in Spain, using olive oil.
01:55 <j**> Hmm...
01:56 <j**> Well, I don't know if the oil would be sizzling by itself at that point. It would start doing so soon, anyway. When you put the egg in, it will be sizzling.
01:56 <j**> I know that doesn't make it easy to tell when to put in the egg, but I tend to do this by intuition.
01:56 <j**> As for the amount of oil: I definitely don't submerge the egg. I just put in enough to cover the bottom of the pan.
01:57 <j**> That is: unaided by scraping, but possibly aided by tilting the pan.
02:00  * S***** nods. "That's what I would consider the typical approach to fat usage."
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--- Log closed Thu Jun 23 06:11:45 2016

--- Log opened Thu Jun 23 06:11:48 2016
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06:11 -!- Irssi: #*******: Total of 4 nicks [1 ops, 0 halfops, 0 voices, 3 normal]
06:13 -!- Irssi: Join to #******* was synced in 83 secs
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12:55 -!- D***-**** is now known as J********
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23:32  * S***** waves.
23:34 <j**> Good day.
23:34 <S*****> Evenin', j**.
23:34 <j**> Have you made any advances in egg-frying research?
23:36 <S*****> I made a fried egg sandwich not long after that disconnect (or whatever that was). Egg, bagel, muenster. The egg was pretty good!
23:37 <S*****> I had a slight issue with the fat (I used margerine, which along with butter always seems to be a pain in the ass on the stovetop), but nothing food-ruining. It mostly just made the egg oddly tan.
23:37 <j**> I see. Nothing wrong with a tan egg, in my opinion.
23:39 <j**> I suppose the advantage of an egg with an intact yolk, if you're eating it in a bagel sandwich, is that you can pop the yolk into the bagel hole and thereby make more efficient use of space.
23:39 <S*****> Heh.
23:40 <S*****> These bagels have fairly tiny holes, which I think is ideal for sandwiching.
23:40 <S*****> And just as an insurance policy, the cheese went under the egg. Wouldn't want to lose any of that eggy, buttery goodness.
23:42 <j**> I'm not sure if it's appropriate to say "buttery" when you used what is essentially just vegetable oil
23:42 <j**> .
23:42 <S*****> Butterish? Butterlike?
23:42 <j**> I suppose saying "eggy, oily goodness" doesn't sound quite as appealing.
23:42 <S*****> It's hydrogenated vegetable oil with mild flavorings to imitate butter.
23:43 <j**> You can taste that hydrogen.
23:43 <S*****> Hehe.
23:44 <S*****> I don't entirely understand the process, but it's what they do to turn the veggie oil from liquid to a melty solid.
23:45 <j**> Yes, I suppose it is a fundamental chemical change, from an unsaturated fat to a saturated fat, which might change how it tastes.
23:47 <S*****> It's also the difference between runny peanut butter and the firmer-but-still-very-spreadable stuff with a more even consistency. And, apparently, there's a similar natural process that our bodies use to adapt to different temperatures.
23:49 <j**> But, still, frying your egg with margarine is somewhere on the scale between frying it with vegetable oil and frying it with butter. I'm not sure where it is relative to frying it with olive oil. Towards the other extreme of the scale, you'd find Bog Butter.
23:50 <S*****> Hah.
23:51 <S*****> That's the stuff people bury down in the peat, which is sometime forgotten and found centuries later, yeah?
23:51 <j**> Yes.
23:51 <S*****> I just heard about that stuff for the first time a week or so ago.
23:51 <j**> The very extremes would be, I don't know... crude oil, and a block of parmesan cheese.
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--- Day changed Sun Jun 26 2016
02:33 -!- S***** [******@********-********.**.**.***.***] has joined #*******
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02:33  * S***** waves.
02:34 <j**> Good day.
02:34 <S*****> Sorry for the in & out, mibbit's little tabs don't work properly.
02:35 <S*****> j**, I just made another egg sandwich. I think I'm dialing in on my method.
02:35 <j**> Very good. Was this also a Bagel sandwich?
02:36 <S*****> It was, yeah.
02:36 <S*****> I
02:36 <j**> If you don't know about it, you might be interested in <https://www.irccloud.com>, which addresses some of Mibbit's issues. (For example, it remains connected for about 30 minutes (with a free account) when you close it.)
02:38 <S*****> I was not aware. Thanks for the tip, I'll give it a try shortly.
02:38 <B****> *speaking japanese, in a girly Southern accent voice*
02:38 <B****> Trying to imagine this is giving me a stroke.
02:39 <j**> I'm sure that happens a bit.
02:39 <S*****> Maybe they mean the Osaka dialect?
02:39 <B****> Hahaha.
02:42 <S*****> As for the sandwich: Lessons learned this time are that I need to break the yolk earlier in the cooking process (it stays too dome-shaped if you wait too long), it's better to butter the bagel before oven-toasting it (but watch those edges), don't forget to cook with the salt and pepper (it's not the same added afterward, though still good), and 4 is the
02:42 <S*****> ideal heat level for this particular stovetop.
02:43 <j**> I think breaking the yolk Immediately is best.
02:43 <S*****> After I flipped it and cooked the other side, the yolk ended up looking like some sort of crumpled hat.
02:43 <j**> Hahaha.
02:44 <S*****> And the height of it, even after the crumpling, made it harder to cook the white on that side.
02:44 <j**> What made you decide to start having your yolk Hard?
02:45 <B****> S***** is straight Yolked lately, I hear.
02:45 <S*****> Oh, I've preferred it that way for a long time.
02:45 <j**> But you just never thought about striving for Perfection until recently?
02:46 <B****> I've also heard that he's looking a bit Swole.
02:46 <S*****> I've just got way less cooking experience than I'd like, particularly with eggs (I'd rarely get to eat them when I lived with my family).
02:46 <j**> I see.
02:46 <S*****> So every fried egg I've ever made has had some fuckup or other in it. Not enough practice, and I was flying blind.
02:47 <j**> You were flying blind? How so? Did your family have a tradition where you have to wear a blindfold in the kitchen?
02:47 <S*****> Heh.
02:48 <S*****> No, I've just never gotten any instruction in matters of cooking from my family, and I never bothered to try and research how to do something as simple as frying an egg (that I still always messed up anyway).
02:49 <j**> I see.
02:49 <S*****> I did take a short cooking class in middle school, but we mostly baked things. To this day I'm a lot more comfortable baking than doing any other sort of cooking.
02:51 <j**> I seem to have the opposite problem: every time I try to bake something, I fuck it up, but I look well sick in a UV light with a frying pan.
02:51 <S*****> Heh.
02:53 <S*****> I like baking because the instructions are usually very explicit. There's less interpreting stuff, less intuition. The heat is measured in degrees, rather than arbitrary numbers and/or "high, medium, low", which vary in output from stove to stove.
02:54 <S*****> And then there's the whole electric VS gas thing. Most recipes seem to assume you're cooking with gas. You can't just quickly raise or lower the heat with electric, so you need to plan ahead if that's required.
02:56 <S*****> But, yeah. As for the "Why now?", while I was in exile I was doing a lot more meal prep. On top of that, I'm trying to eat more freshfood and relying less on frozen, canned, or other "easy" meals.
02:57 <S*****> Beth's mother isn't in the best health, so I made most stuff for the both of us. I made a fuckload of iced tea, in particular.
02:57 <j**> I see. So the sensible place to start is the Easy Meal of nature: the egg.
02:58 <j**> In the Cooked division.
02:58 <j**> In the Raw division, I suppose the banana would be a contender.
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--- Log opened Fri Jul 01 06:24:54 2016
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11:07 <S*****> My last egg sandwich was approaching perfection, I think. It was a two-egger, and the only real fuckup was prematurely breaking one of the yolks when cracking the eggs.
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11:11 <j**> A double-egger!
11:12 <j**> What were the effects of this supposedly premature eyolkulation?
11:12 <S*****> Hah.
11:13 <S*****> One side of the end product was basically all one thin layer of yolk.
11:14 <j**> I suppose that could be undesirable.
11:14 <j**> A suggestion from the previous video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wO6R4RxnSlw
11:14 <S*****> See, I crack the eggs into a vessel of some kind, instead of directly into the pan. That way, if I get a bad egg, I just throw it out and I don't have to drop everything to scrub the pan down.
11:15 <S*****> So I crack the eggs, and then it usually just sits there a bit while the conditions get where I need them.
11:16 <S*****> This gave the one broken yolk plenty of time to go all Exxon Valdez.