I don’t like cleaning a pan when I get up early for work. I have a microwave
I’m breaking my 2 month interaction hiatus on this thread to spread the gospel of the 6 minute egg. Literally just boil an egg for 6 minutes, peel, and shove into face. If you wanna get fancy and/or you like ramen, make a mixture of ¼ cup soy sauce, ¼ cup mirin, ¼ cup sake or water, 1 tsp sugar per 4 eggs you’re cooking. After boiling and peeling, submerge the eggs in the mixture and soak in a covered container overnight (or at least 4 hours). Doesn’t get any better.
Boiled, probably.
Pot of water. Bring to a rolling boil. Lower eggs in with tongs. Turn down to medium. Set a timer. Drain, and run under cold water for about another 30-60 seconds (this helps the shells detach).
So long as you don’t drop the eggs too hard, they usually maintain containment so you can just dry the pot and put it away, no real cleanup to speak of.
For soft (completely set whites, still mostly liquid yolk), around 7.5 - 8.5 minutes depending on your stove, the size of the eggs, and whether they’re starting from fridge or room temperature.
Reasonably once the eggs are in the pot you could leave them cooking and take a shower, watching it isn’t essential.
Dedicated egg cooking appliances are also available; you load 1-6 eggs (typically) and a measured amount of water for the number of eggs and soft/medium/hard boiled, push the button, and walk away. Basically a toaster for eggs.
How big/thick shelled are your eggs that you need 7.5 - 8 min?
Mine are done in 4 min, max. Hard white, gooey yellow. Yum :)
Because more eggs are used for baking than straight eating in our house, ones sold as “jumbo”.
Exact size varies a little by brand but usually means ≥65g.
Boiled egg times vary a lot with elevation. Water boils at a cooler temperature at high elevation than at sea level. This cooler boiling water means eggs take longer to cook.
Large eggs (50g each) straight out of the fridge (~3ºC) will take about 7min to reach that stage of doneness. Extra-large would take longer. Room temp eggs and smaller eggs would cook faster.
Fair. We have two kinds of eggs here. The ‘large’ thin shelled commercial, a max ~ 40g, and a thick shelled small egg (~ 20g) from our own hens. (The small ones are both tastier and healthier, but our chickens are more pets. Not an egg laying variety. Those are just a bonus)
Edit: Forgot to add, they are also boiled straight out of a fridge at 5C
Scramble and microwave. About 1 minute for 3 eggs in a 1250watt microwave.
Easy and fast. Should still be just a tad bit wet when you pull them out. It will finish cooking with the residual heat after taking it out.
I’ve recently finally learned how to fry eggs properly so they’re solid on the outside, but with soft yolk and without the albumen turning into rubber. The key is to use the largest burner, have it cranked up to the maximum strength and preheat the pan on that. Splash just about a teaspoon of oil into it. While you drop in the eggs, throw away the shells and wipe your hand, the first egg should already solidify on one side. Turn them over, then cook for like twenty more seconds while cutting the albumen with the spatula. Takes two minutes total tops, and all the egg should slide right off into the plate.
Alternatively, you can just hard-boil a dozen of eggs all at once, put them in the fridge, and take them away over the week. Boiled eggs are fine cold.
look up HowToBasic on YouTube for hundreds of egg related cooking videos and tutorials!
I basically just deglaze the pan after frying eggs in it. A little water and heat on the stove goes a hell of a long way to getting leftover egg gunk off my pans quickly…
My grandpa used to cook scrambled eggs in the microwave. I don’t remember his exact process for it, but it wasn’t too complicated. I don’t know if the clean up would be easier.
You could also hard boil eggs in advance and just peel them in the morning. They’ll keep a few days in the fridge.
I used to cook two eggs in a coffee cup in the microwave and a piece of bacon with a piece of toast almost every day before I moved to an off-grid house that can’t handle a microwave.
180C 7 minutes in an air fryer.
You can cook a dozen eggs in a sheet pan, slice them up into patties, put them in breakfast sandwiches, and freeze them. One pan to wash, about an hour of prep, and that’s 12 breakfasts before you have to do it again.
I don’t even use a sheet pan, just right on the oven rack. I used to put a sheet pan on the rack below the eggs (i usually just do 2 at a time) in case of a Humpty Dumpty incident, but that has never happened.
Wait, like in the shell? How’s that work compared to hard boil?
You know you can just re-use the pan multiple days, right?
I keep seeing this method from Joses Andres and have been meaning to try it. Sounds about as easy as can be, with minimal cleanup. And uses the microwave:
https://www.foodandwine.com/how-jose-andres-makes-a-microwave-omelet-11913926
It works and is quite good.
Good to hear! - I’m inspired to try it now on this long weekend. (Although who am I to have doubted José’s Andres… the man is a benelovent humanitarian culinary genius and Spanish cuisine is right in line with where my tastes lie).
Easiest way to cook or easiest way to clean up? 😉
I learned how to make Thai Omelettes and that’s now my favorite way…
In a large pan or wok, pour one cup of vegetable oil and heat it to boiling.
In a glass, crack 2 eggs, add a splash of water, a teaspoon of fish sauce, a teaspoon of lime juice and beat with a fork until combined.
Add a tablespoon of corn starch and mix well until there are no lumps.
When the oil is hot enough (water drops spatter when added) take the glass, hold it about a foot over the pan, and pour the egg mixture in.
What happens next is MAGIC!
It expands out into this giant flower of fried eggy goodness. It cooks fast, fast, fast. About 1 minute per side. Look for it to turn golden, flip it, golden again, and remove it.
Now, for clean up, it will have absorbed some, but not all, of the oil. If you find yourself cooking this a LOT (AND WHY WOULDN’T YOU?) you can keep using the same pan and oil, just keep topping it off.
Video:
Air fryer. Very similar results to boiling. Zero mess.
That sounds like microwaving… I’m suspicious. Not sure i want to test in my air fryer. XD
Unlike the microwave, air fryers do a good job circulating heat evenly around the food. 15 minutes on low heat, should be plenty safe.
What’s “low”? 315’f?
I’ve had good results at around 120°C.
Thanks! I’ll give it a try! Should I preheat the airfryer or start from cold?
I never bother with preheating, but experiment to figure out what works for you!
I really don’t think it gets much easier than just cracking eggs into a pan personally, if you’re finding your having a lot of trouble with cooked-on egg gunk, that sounds to me like a technique/skill issue, pan to hot or not letting it preheat enough and/or not enough oil/butter/grease.
Get those variables right and you shouldn’t really have much cleaning to do, I can pretty much just rinse and wipe off my pans after frying an egg, no real scrubbing or scraping or anything needed no matter if I’m using stainless, nonstick, cast iron, etc.
If hard/soft boiled eggs are appealing to you, I have a little dash egg steamer doohickey that works really well, although personally I think peeling eggs is more fiddly than cleaning a pan
There’s a few doodads out there for poaching eggs in the microwave, but personally I’ve never had much luck with them, they always seem to come out overdone or explode which makes for more cleanup than a pan.
There’s a few ways to do eggs in the oven, my wife meal preps egg whites with various mix-ins in some oven safe glass containers and just heats them back up in the microwave throughout the week.
Crack egg into mug, add salt, pepper and a splash of milk, whisk with fork (not too much), microwave for like a minute. Viola! Scrambled eggs in mug, could add more eggs and more time microwaving if desired, correct amount of time microwaving to be found through experimentation.
Do you want “easiest” or “most convenient”? You could buy powdered (dehydrated) eggs and just add water if you’re not picky. Probably on par with the quality of eggs cooked in a microwave. I’ve never cooked eggs in a microwave so I can’t be sure, though.
If you want like, good eggs for breakfast, I don’t think you can get around using at least a pan. If you have nonstick pans, it should be pretty easy to cook the eggs and barely have to wipe down the pan with a paper towel to clean it. If you’re always getting black, charred bits stuck to the pan, try turning down the heat when cooking them; it doesn’t take much heat to cook an egg (unless you wanna fry it and get that crispy exterior, but even then you don’t need high heat)
Guess you could go for boiling or poaching the eggs, since that involves submerging the egg in boiling water, which leaves virtually nothing to clean.
Or you could just crack a bunch of raw eggs into a glass and chug 'em Rocky-style. But raw eggs aren’t as nutritious as cooked eggs so I wouldn’t recommend it.
You have strong opinions on microwaved eggs before stating that you’ve never had them. Could you go into that further?
I disagree that flippantly suggesting that conventional cooking methods produce “good” eggs compared to microwaved or powdered eggs qualifies as a “strong opinion”. But I love hearing myself talk, so:
I am unashamed to say that I am prejudiced against microwaved eggs for the same reason I’m prejudiced against making toast by microwaving bread. I haven’t tried it, but I am free to intuit (correctly or incorrectly) that I wouldn’t prefer it to how I already prepare eggs and toast. And in this economy, I’m not going to gamble an egg to see if I prefer it.
Do you prefer microwaved eggs? How do you find the taste and texture compare to other cooking methods? How do they compare to powdered eggs?
I’ve never had powdered eggs, they’re not really a thing where I’m from. But they don’t appeal, probably for the same reason as you: texture.
Microwaves function by heating up the water in food. That’s why they excel with frozen food (it’s more forgiving in timing). If you try to microwave bread, you get warm, soggy bread as a result, almost certainly not what you mean by toast (but it’s actually an interesting way to rescue a stale baguette). Effectively you can’t “make toast” in a microwave because toasting is a manner of cooking, not an end product. You can’t microwave a dinner in a toaster either. Won’t work. Toasters heat the outside exclusively, working their way in. Microwaves heat the inside almost exclusively (that’s where the water is). So whether they’re appropriate really depends on what you’re cooking. Bread? Bad. Eggs?
Because shell-on eggs are effectively water-sealed and shell-off eggs are effectively water, how you heat them up doesn’t really matter. Unless you are frying to get crispy edges, you are just heating water any way you do it. Water flows: you can’t heat the outside exclusively. It’s only when the egg is already cooked, the texture already changed, that you can then effectively cook it again/differently to get crispy edges.
