In the wide world of breakfast food, few options stand on their own like a perfectly fried egg. Cooked in butter or oil— whether it’s cooked over easy, over hard, or sunny side up — it’s hard to beat a nice fried egg. Serve it with a side of bacon, hash browns or on a toasted piece of sourdough bread, and you’ve got a winner of a breakfast.
When cooking my fried egg this time around, I took inspiration from TikTok user @dansgoodside, who used part of an ingredient I would otherwise throw away in his recipe – pickle juice. After frying the eggs until three-quarters done, in the video, he added pickle juice. While I did initially think this was strange, when I thought about it, the combination makes enough sense. It’s a salty, briny finish that doesn’t seem to overpower the subtle flavour and texture of the eggs. Aside from using pickle juice, I decided to ditch the oil and butter and start off frying my egg with water, and it worked surprisingly well.
Using water and covering the frying pan with the lid at the start of making the fried egg allowed the steam to cook the top of the egg, so there is no need to flip it.
As a recent pickle lover, I was eager to see how pickle juice would impact the flavour of the egg.
To begin, I placed my frying pan on the stove on medium heat before adding the egg. I find that it’s easiest to crack the egg in a small bowl first to avoid any chance of shells falling in.
After the egg started to set, I added a tablespoon of water to the pan and immediately covered it with a lid.
Once 30 seconds had passed, I added in a tablespoon of pickle juice, tipping the pan from side to side to allow the brine to run over the egg and the surface of the pan.
Avoid adding the juice to the pan too early, as it can result in the whites having a bit more of a firmer texture.
I served the egg on a piece of buttered sourdough bread. While I would add salt at the end, this wasn’t needed after using the pickle juice.
The flavour of the egg was a bit more subtle than I was expecting, but I really liked the muted notes of mustard and vinegar present in the brine. It was easier to detect the pickle flavour in the egg whites than in the yolk.
If you really want another boost of pickle brine flavour, you could drizzle a little more onto your eggs right before serving.
To cook the egg, I tested Lakeland’s latest kitchen innovation, the Only Pan, which rivals the £125 Always Pan by Our Place. It’s designed to be a non-stick multi-functional pan with eight possible uses, from steaming to stir-frying. It comes with accessories that include a stainless steel steamer basket and a silicone turner.
Retailing for £59.99, this frying pan worked incredibly well to cook the egg, better than my previous non-stick pan that required me to use a lot of oil when frying eggs.
However, on Lakeland’s website, one customer noted a downside to that pan, which is that it “does not work with all induction hobs”. They said: “We bought one of these pans, hoping to use it with our induction hob, but it doesn’t work. The description says that it works with induction hobs, but clearly not with all of them.”
Quick to respond, the team at Lakeland recommended those with induction hobs turn the pan on the hob to try different positions, as “it may be that the magnet in the hob is hitting a small part of the aluminium through the stainless steel mesh”.
