Scrub kosher salt into the surface of your stainless steel pan, says Wirecutter, citing the French Culinary Institute: This is "a hack to create a slippery surface," by filling in all the little microscopic cracks and ridges in the surface of the pan, so that you can cook eggs in the pan and they will not stick.
This method is truly a boon for frying and scrambling eggs, though mastering it requires a bit of patience. Nailing it took me three tries, but once I got it down, I was shocked by the results.
Three tries! To master the technique of buffing kosher salt onto a pan! So that you can cook some eggs! This is lunacy.
I am not here to dispute that this salt technique works. I am sure that it works just fine. But maybe you, like me, do not want to have to scrub a dang pan with kosher salt just to be able to cook a couple of eggs in it. Maybe you, like me, figure that if a pan were meant to have a surface crammed with kosher salt crystals in order to be usable for basic acts of cooking, then they should have made the pan out of kosher salt instead of stainless steel—and from there maybe you reason that since the pan-makers did, in fact, make the pan out of stainless steel (not an easy or cheap thing to do! Not like stamping it out of Play-Doh!) and not kosher salt, probably they regarded stainless steel as a good material for the surface of a pan that will be used to cook things. Maybe you figure, then, that there must be some way to use this cooking pan for cooking without having to first amend the solid composition of its surface.
Right you are! I know an even easier and cheaper "hack" for frying and scrambling eggs in a stainless steel pan without them sticking to it. Are you ready for the hack? Are you? Huh? Here it is:
Heat.
That is the hack. Apply heat to the pan, over several minutes, for example perhaps over a "burner" set to "medium" on a "stovetop range," until the pan is evenly and very hot. Add some normal cooking fat to the pan, and then allow this, too, to become evenly and very hot. Now the pan is ready for cooking some eggs in it.
You might be wondering, Sir, please, handsome and good sir—making the pan and the cooking fat in it hot? Is that not, sir, kind and noble sir, just "cooking"? It is! It is in fact just "cooking." To some extent the hack I am offering here today is: Cook eggs in a stainless steel pan by cooking them in a hot stainless steel pan.
But many people, possibly up to all people, do not intuitively grasp the levels of heat required by actual good cooking; their approach to cooking techniques such as frying and searing and sautéing, consciously or otherwise, is to aim for the lowest possible level of heat that will cook their food, based on the misapprehension that by slowing things down they can avoid mistakes, like how a driver following directions on an unfamiliar highway will go slow so as not to zoom by their exit. This has the effect of treating their stove like it is a vengeful mountaintop god or a dragon snoozing lightly atop a pile of treasure: You creep up to it, only as near as you absolutely must get, to grab what you need and scurry away before it smites you.
I was like this once. Probably only sociopaths do not ever have to go through this stage: Heat can be scary, and can cause burns to food and to cooks, and everybody has in the recesses of their mind countless pop-cultural depictions of the archetypal kitchen-clueless doofus starting a fire or incinerating their dinner. And yes, it is true that higher heat makes things happen faster, and food can go from undercooked to burnt more quickly this way. This is like how inexperienced cooks wrongly fear a sharp kitchen knife more than a dull one, but the dull one is a zillion times likelier to end up chopping into your finger, because it will not behave with the smooth, effortless dependability of the razor-sharp one. That does not mean that the razor-sharp knife is not dangerous! But the solution to that danger is not to dull your knife; it's to learn how to use it.
In reality, inept cooking by inexperienced cooks virtually never is characterized by burning, char, and fire, the way it is in cartoons and movies. Inept cooking in the real world is characterized by grayness, wateriness, and blandness; by lack of textural interest and visual appeal; by thinness of flavor; by meat that got chewy and dry, or a vegetable that got wan and soggy, because the instructions said to "brown" it and that took 25 minutes because the flame was not high enough. It is characterized by a pan caked with stuck-on food. This is because the fearful cook did not dare employ the level of heat required to cook their food the way it was supposed to be cooked—and to cook it without everything sticking to the pan.
Your stovetop is not a vengeful mountaintop god! Nor is it a dragon. It is in fact a tool for making things hot. You are the fire god in this relationship. Does the fire god fear fire? The fire god wields fire!
We were talking about eggs. Here is a fact: Beaten eggs will even stick to a Teflon-coated pan if that pan is not hot enough when you add the eggs to it. The important thing is heat. The pan must be very hot. If you are using a stainless steel or cast iron pan, and therefore must use some cooking fat, first of all, hell yeah buddy, good for you, but second of all, the fat must also be very hot. It is no good to heat up a pan to appropriate cooking heat, then add room-temperature fat to it, and then immediately try to cook food in there: You just cooled the pan down and did not give it time to heat back up.
I cook eggs all the dang time. I use a stainless steel pan the vast majority of the time, whether I am scrambling the eggs or frying the eggs or making an omelet, and they do not stick to it. I have never once buffed kosher salt into the surface of the pan, nor will I ever. In fact I am a harsh and demanding taskmaster to my stainless steel pan; I am Heathcliff to its Hareton, and it must serve me on my terms or go to hell; a pan that requires Lintonian babying will receive Lintonian contempt and disuse.
Here is how I cook scrambled eggs in my stainless steel pan. You can do it this way too. Or you can wear out your elbow buffing kosher salt into your pan first, and then by the time you are done cooking your eggs that way, like a sucker, I will be off digging up Catherine's grave yet again, for kicks.
The first thing is to crack a couple of eggs into a bowl. Then sprinkle them with a tiny bit of salt, and beat them vigorously with a fork. In my experience, somewhat backed by some vaguely science-ish claims I half-recall possibly having read many years ago (maybe on Serious Eats?), adding some salt to the eggs ahead of time prevents them from discharging a bunch of water when I cook them, so that my finished eggs never come with a bunch of water. In any event that is what I do, and my eggs never stick to the pan and also always taste good and are good to eat.
Now I set the bowl aside, and I set my stainless steel pan on the stove, turn on the burner under it, and set it to medium heat. Medium? you are asking. I thought you said the important thing was to have lots of heat! You treacherous blackguard! You scoundrel! I'll be avenged for this betrayal! Calm down. Nobody needs to be throwing around words like "blackguard" in this situation.
We are heating the pan on medium so that it will heat evenly, and because we are in no rush, and because it is good to give the beaten eggs a few minutes to warm up, too, if they came out of the refrigerator. The less cold they are when they hit the cooking fat in the pan, the less they will cool that fat when they hit it, and the better (and less sticky!) they will be.
Now I add some cooking fat to the pan. Generally this is a neutral cooking oil like canola or light olive oil. You can use butter if you like; if you are using regular butter and not ghee, then know going in that it will not be hot enough for this job until it has browned a bit and begun to smoke. This is fine. Browned butter tastes good, so long as you don't let it go too far in there. What you should not use is extra-virgin olive oil, which is wasted on this kind of job: You will have to heat it past its smoke point, which will squander its flavor and nutritional value and make it kinda nasty.
After a few minutes the pan and fat will be very hot. I will not pretend to have any idea exactly how hot, in degrees Fahrenheit or Celsius or Kelvin or whatever, they must be. You will learn by repetition to recognize the signs—shimmering fat, light smoke, whatever—of a greased pan that is hot enough to cook eggs without sticking. A thing people sometimes do who have not yet added oil to their pan, to gauge whether it is hot enough, is to wet their fingers and flick some droplets of water in there; the thing to look for, if the pan is hot enough, is not for the droplets to sizzle and evaporate but rather for them to bounce and scatter and race around the pan as though panicking in terror. If you like, you can do that first, then add the fat, then wait another couple minutes for things to get back to where they were before you added the fat.
Swirl the fat around so that it coats the lower inch or so of the sides of the pan. Now pour the beaten eggs in there, and start moving them around with a slotted wooden spatula or flexible silicon spatula or your driver's license or whatever. Hey! Wow! They aren't sticking! Not even a little bit!
If you are making an omelet, you can push the outer edges in and swirl the pan around a little, so the liquid egg runs around out there and cooks; scatter some grated cheese across the top of the omelet, then fold the sides in, wait a few extra seconds, turn the heat off, and slide that sucker onto a plate. If you are making regular scrambled eggs, simply keep stirring and moving things around until the eggs are almost but definitely still not completely set, then turn the heat off and slide them onto a plate.
If the pan and the oil were hot enough, there will be zero egg residue left in there. When it's cool, you can wipe it down for five seconds with a dry rag and it will look as clean as the day you bought it. If the pan has egg stuck to it, it and the oil were not hot enough. When it's cooled down (this shouldn't take long, due to it not having been hot enough to begin with), dunk it in sudsy water in the sink and spend 20 seconds scrubbing it with the scrubby side of a kitchen sponge or a wad of steel wool.
Save the kosher salt for adding flavor to your food. Most home cooks err on the wrong side of that, too! But that is a subject for another blog. Enjoy your eggs.
