Nothing is better than waking up in the morning and having the time to make yourself a breakfast roll, but I often dread having to cook fried eggs. In my experience, frying eggs is always a nuisance as they leave an unpleasant smell in the kitchen, oil tends to splatter in every direction, and more often than not they end up burnt.
However, I recently realised that I have been cooking eggs wrong all my life, as it turns out the key to a tasty fried egg is not lots of butter or oil, but simply a splash of water. It might sound strange, but fried eggs often come out the pan wrong as butter and oil cooks the whites too quickly, while the top yolk part of the egg is still undercooked.
This results in a fried egg that is charred at the bottom while the middle is still gooey and raw, which makes it taste very bitter and rubbery.
Using water to cook a fried egg is a simple technique that allows the steam to cook the top of the egg, so there is no need to flip it.
This results in the egg cooking more evenly at a slower pace, so will be fully set, tender and with a fully cooked yolk when it is ready to come out of the frying pan.
I have been using this method for a little while now, and it has resulted in a tasty fried egg that is perfectly done every time, and it has made cooking breakfast a lot simpler.
How to make a fried egg with water
You will need:
- Any free-range eggs of your choice
- One tablespoon of water
- A frying pan with a lid
- Oil spray
You need some sort of cooking fat for the eggs, and after some trial-and-error I discovered a cooking spray works better than using butter or oil.
It results in less splattering or any lingering smells afterward, plus it also makes cleaning the frying pan a lot easier after cooking.
Method:
To begin, place a frying pan on the stove on a medium heat, then add just enough your cooking spray to coat the bottom of the pan.
Once the pan is hot, crack the egg into the pan and let it cook for roughly a minute until it begins the whites begin to set.
Then, add a tablespoon of water to the pan away from the egg, and immediately cover with a lid.
Let the egg cook for another minute or two, making sure to keep checking on it every 30 seconds until it is cooked to your liking.
Your fried egg will have perfectly crisp edges while remaining soft in the centre, and it will taste much lighter without the greasiness or oiliness it usually would have.