Sickness and scrambled eggs

Today I’m feeling like crap because my head, lungs and stomach hurt. Basically I should probably be in bed right now. Let’s make eggs.

My old way

I’ve previously made scrambled eggs by cracking them into a bowl, whisking in some salt and pepper, throwing it in a non-stick frying pan on a high heat until it was solid; duly scrambling them along the way, of course.

This makes scrambled eggs. You took eggs and scrambled them, how could you not make scrambled eggs?

Despite them being scrambled eggs they tend to be fairly dry, flavourless and are annoying to clean up. I also got a strangely poor return on investment and I always ended up getting less scrambled egg than I was really expecting.

Scrambled eggs are simple enough, there must be a better way.

Something entirely new (but not really)

• 1-2 tablespoons of butter
• 4 large, free range eggs
• Sea salt
• Ground peppercorn
• 1-2 tablespoons of creme fraiche

I started by heating the pan on the lowest heat. After several minutes this was obviously not good enough for my old electric hob, so I cranked it up to medium and let it heat up before throwing in a generous tablespoon of butter.

(Side note: Not cooking on high is so weird to me. I’ve always cooked for speed and convenience before and that meant doing things as quickly as possible. Guess that’s the first thing I need to change.)

While the butter was melting I cracked the eggs into a bowl and whisked them together with salt and pepper. In the past this would’ve been budget battery farm eggs with a pinch of table salt and fine powdery pepper added, now it’s free range eggs with coarse sea salt and ground peppercorn! Other than the jump in ingredient quality this was just like I’d done in the past.

I threw the egg mixture into the pan when the majority of the butter had melted and let it sit for a while. Whereas before I’d have expected it to start coagulating immediately this was now a slow process and it was a few more minutes before i could really start scrambling it properly. After a couple of folks with a wooden spatula I added in the creme fraiche and mixed it in to the rest of the mixture, cooking until all of the mixture had turned opaque.

By comparison to my old scrambled eggs—which were always dry and flakey—the new recipe wielded a large, somewhat gooey lump of egg mass. I threw it on some buttered Milk Roll (gotta get my calcium somehow!) and it was so rich compared to what I’m used to I almost had to stop eating it for a moment. Keyword: almost.

Verdict

The new scrambled egg recipe was certainly better than what I used to make. Assuming I have the ingredients to hand in future I’d probably make them again.

If I had to change anything I’d probably reduce the amount of creme fraiche, as I think it might be too rich. Adding chives or spring onions is a possibility too.

And finally, I learned that the frying pan is a pain to clean no matter how you make your scrambled eggs.