Everything You Need To Know About Eggs

Chris? Yo.

Do you want to see my perfect omelet?

Shut up!

(laughing)

Guys, this video's all about eggs.

One egg, four ways.

First I'm gonna poach it, then I'm gonna fry it,

then I'm gonna scramble it,

then I'm gonna make an omelet out of it.

The same egg, all the way through.

It's magic!

No it will be different eggs.

Fist of all, let's talk about an egg.

We use large eggs in the Bon Appetit Test Kitchen.

I prefer an organic egg.

A pastured egg is probably these days

considered the most eco, beautiful,

happiest chicken kind of an egg.

If you do one thing, just buy a fresh large egg.

Rules for poaching an egg.

You have your large egg, fridge cold.

Pan of water.

A lot of recipes are gonna tell you

that into this water, or somewhere involved,

you need vinegar.

I am gonna tell you no.

So the two things that you need to remember

about the letter V,

are vinegar no, and vortex yes.

Okay, vinegar helps the egg white coagulate,

which is why a lot of recipes say to put it into the water

or to put the egg in the vinegar.

In my experience, when you put in enough vinegar

for it to actually have an effect on coagulating the white,

you taste the vinegar.

So I experimented, and this method works great.

It is a pan of barely simmering water

and with this spoon, very scientifically,

I'm making a vortex.

And then into there goes the egg.

Two minutes, thirty seconds.

You need to be precise with the cooking of the egg.

A very small amount of time

can make a very big amount of difference.

Flip it over a couple of times.

You just wanna have the white sort of wrapping around

the yolk as much as possible.

Double check your egg.

Just pull it out of the water.

What you wanna see is that the white is set,

but not super hard, it still looks luscious,

and you can actually just press on the yolk

and make sure that it has some give to it.

That means that it's still gonna be runny.

This to me looks slightly translucent

over the top of the yolk,

so I'm gonna give him a couple more spins.

All right, so I'm going right on to

a buttered English Muffin,

which is my favorite way to enjoy an poached egg.

Sometimes I make poached eggs for breakfast

for my 14 year old son,

and people say oh you're insane, you're crazy,

you're one of those crazy food magazine people

that makes poached eggs!

It takes two and a half minutes.

It's like, why wouldn't you poach an egg?

Water, egg, oh, perfect.

Do you wanna fry an egg right now?

[Chris] Let's fry an egg right now.

Let's fry an egg.

I like to fry an egg so that it has a lot of crunchy texture

and I also like to eat eggs for dinner,

and I like to eat them with greens.

So before I even make my egg, I'm gonna make some greens.

The first thing is Swiss Chard stems,

and it's kind of amazing the amount of greens you need

for a portion, and this is gonna be the bed

for my crispy fried egg.

And now the pan's already heated up.

I'm also putting enough oil

to completely coat the bottom of the pan.

And that's key, and it's gonna seem like a lot,

and I can already hear about it,

but most of it's gonna stay in the pan.

Nothing is gonna stick, it's gonna add a lot of flavor,

and you will see, towards the end,

I need an excess of oil to make sure the white is cooked.

I like to crack my eggs

right on the surface of a flat surface

because when it shatters, it doesn't

push egg inside of the shell

the way cracking on the edge of a bowl, you know,

pushes the egg in.

So I always smack it on a flat surface.

So right away, a lot of puffing,

a lot of snapping and crackling,

and I already have some brown edges,

and that's what I'm going for.

So this hot oil, which there's a little extra of,

I'm just gonna spoon onto the white of the egg,

and I'm trying to avoid the yolk.

Look, it's so dramatic and puffy, and crispy, and lacy,

but it's not overcooked.

And that should take less than two minutes, and it's done.

If you were to try and do this with butter,

and you didn't have olive oil,

because the heat in the pan is getting up so high,

the butter would absolutely burn, blacken, char,

it would be a smokey mess, it would not taste good at all.

I'm gonna have another bite.

This is very delicious.

All right, we're making scrambled eggs.

I am making scrambled eggs.

I think a good rule of thumb,

unless you have a Hungry Man breakfast

that you need to put together, is two eggs for one person.

Two eggs, smacked on the surface, cracked in.

You're not adding milk or cream or sour cream or stuff

to the uncooked egg mixture.

You can add stuff later, but to go into the pan,

it's just the eggs.

And what you're going for with the scrambling

is a completely homogenous mixture.

Egg whites and egg yolks cook at different rates.

So in order for them to cook together

into something that is really luscious

and really silky and really dense and velvety,

they need to be well combined.

There is a little bit of air getting beaten into these,

but I'm trying not to beat in a ton of air.

Because if it's very airy, and this is true for omelets too,

you'll get more of a spongy texture,

and less of a dense and silky texture.

I always put a little bit of salt into my eggs

before I start cooking them, but like right before.

If you do it too far ahead, something weird happens,

and they get this kind of glassy, thin look to them.

So just salt them, and then go in.

So the best medium for scrambled eggs in my book

is butter, just nice butter, make sure it's fresh.

And this time I am using the non-stick pan.

I'm not looking for a big sizzle,

I'm not looking for a big

heat seizing up thing when these go in, it's very gentle.

We're being gentle to ourselves,

we're being gentle to the egg, gently melting the butter.

So as soon as this foam kind of dies down,

my pretty eggs are gonna go in,

and what I'm going for in this technique

is very silky, soft, large curd scrambled eggs.

There's another style of scrambled eggs

where it's a very small curd,

and it's almost creamy, it almost looks like cottage cheese.

That's not what I'm going for.

I'm stirring around, I'm scraping the sides,

I'm sort of pushing the egg back and forth

along the bottom of the pan, and then I'm waiting again.

In between stirring, I'm just kind of letting it go,

keeping an eye on it,

listening to hear any kind of fat bubbling around the side,

which would be an indication that it was hot,

and watching the egg set up.

It should look just a little bit still wet along the top.

I'm gonna stop.

I'm gonna put a little bit of cilantro.

You could put ricotta in these, you could put parm,

that would be really nice.

This is the texture egg that I would like

inside of a breakfast burrito.

That would be pretty ideal.

So, scrambling and egg is so easy, my child can do it.

The next thing I'm gonna do is a perfect French Omelet,

which is so difficult to do

that maybe I myself will not be able to do it.

But it will be fun to watch.

You're gonna recognize the beginning of this omelet making

from scrambled egg making, because they start the same way.

You want a very homogenous mixture

of the white and the yolk.

So unlike a Frittata,

a French Omelet should have no color on it,

perfectly golden, absolutely no browning going on,

no drying out, creamy,

Chris Morocco knows so much about this.

Baveuse. Baveuse, right.

Baveuse means dog drool, it literally means dog drool.

And that's how the center of your omelet should be.

Drooly.

Frankly, I'm feeling a little bit of anxiety,

I'm not gonna lie.

Tablespoon of butter, medium heat,

lovely, not too frothy,

but completely homogenous couple of eggs.

With my patented rubbing my belly and patting my head

at the same time maneuver,

stirring, scraping, and then a couple of taps.

Just get, settle, settle down.

All right, so I'm gonna take about an ounce of Boursin,

or any other melty cheesy,

and now I'm going to attempt to roll over.

Ha ha!

That is very good!

I don't know what accent that was.

That was like French and like weird guy on the street.

I'm going to roll over!

Well, (laughing) c'est bon!

This is one of those things,

if I were to go in QVC right now,

and they had an omelet turner-overer,

I would buy it.

I'm very humbled right now.

All right, let's just do it!

(laughing) Okay, okay.

I'm not gonna beat myself up too much.

It's pale yellow, it has no color, it's shiny AF.

It has little crack in it,

but into la crack,

I put la chives.

No one knows.

Hereby concludes egg four ways.

And if you count the four times I had to do the poached eggs

and the four omelets that I made --

Take five.

Then that's like eggs ten or eleven ways.

So all of the ways.

There's eggs in the morning, there's easy eggs,

there's eggs that children should do,

there's eggs that only people

who are born in France should do,

and we've done them all.

And now you can do them all,

and you can show us how it goes,

and tell us everything I did wrong,

and you know, put an egg on it.

No, that's gross.

Ta-da!

Perfect. Merci.