The Egg Essay
Alaina Baumohl, Editor-in-Chief Emeritus | Artwork by Eric Kim, Design Director Emeritus
Eggs are the greatest food form to have been created. I eat them for breakfast nearly every morning. There are dozens of wonderful and delicious ways to consume eggs, as my favorite YouTube cooking video, Bon Appetit’s “Every Way to Cook an Egg (59 ways),” shows. But one comes out on top — the reigning champion.
Say goodbye to the powder mix scrambled eggs found at hotel breakfast bars. Forever banished is the crumbly, overcooked, normal scrambled egg. Enter: The Soft-Scrambled Egg.
Soft-scrambled eggs are tricky business. They cannot be left unattended unless you enjoy accidental omelets or losing half of your egg mass to the bottom of your not non-stick pan. My mother made me fear Teflon more than God himself, so non-stick anything has never entered my repertoire.
To make the best soft-scramble, start by pulling out a carton of eggs and let them relax on the counter for about ten minutes. It’s easier to not overcook the eggs when they’re closer to room temperature before hitting the pan. The experts (Google) say thirty minutes is best but before a hectic day of class, who has time for that? Next, crack two eggs into a bowl and gently whisk them with a pinch of kosher salt. Be careful not to whisk too aggressively. Adding too much air will make your eggs fluffy, and we want them silky and spreadable. Even custard-like.
Don’t forget the salt either; I read once in New York Times Cooking that the salt helps break down the enzymes in the egg, starting the cooking process before the egg even hits the pan. Let the whisked eggs rest in the bowl for a moment as you prep the pan. It’s also, conveniently, more time for the eggs to warm up to room temperature.
Turn your stove on to low heat and add a pad of butter. Butter is better than cooking oil since it adds creaminess and depth of flavor. Once the butter melts, pour in your precious egg mixture, and use a rubber spatula to move it around the pan, preventing any sticking that may occur. As the mixture begins to transform from liquid to (language warning) chunky and slightly mushy, turn off the heat and continue to scrape the bottom of the pan, letting the residual heat finish the work. Place the soft-scramble into a bowl and top with avocado and flaky salt if you’re feeling bougie, or atop your morning carb of choice. In a perfect world, mine would be sourdough bread, but my ancestors cursed me with gluten intolerance. So, for me, gluten-free toast it is. But you, dear reader, can have sourdough.
I’ve heard that eggs are often the first food they make you master in culinary school; cooking them teaches you the fundamentals of temperature control, texture, and seasoning. Naturally, many of us have come to have strong egg preferences.
Over this past winter break, my dad asked me to show him how to make my typical soft-scrambled eggs. This is a man who cannot cook, nor one who is really bothered by that fact. But this request for egg lessons was a brittle olive branch.
One story I like to horrify my friends with is of a failed cooking endeavor of his when I was no more than nine-years-old. On this rare occasion, my mom was out of town, traveling for work. This left him with the task of feeding my younger brother and me. I remember us standing in the kitchen, so overwhelmed with the decision of dinner that no one bothered to turn the kitchen light on. For some godforsaken reason, he microwaved (mistake number 1) chunks of ground beef atop a leftover, frozen macaroni and cheese meal from a prior dinner. When the atrocity of a meal was lowered from the microwave to my face for inspection, I gasped and exclaimed, “Dad! Why is the meat still pink and squiggly?” Out of sheer horror and a dash of manipulation, I burst into tears. We got Subway for dinner instead.
The same morning he asked for egg lessons, we had just screamed at one another in the kitchen over something I can’t even remember. This sort of fighting between us has been one of the constants of my life. Always yelling around one another, but neither of us heard.
That day, I tried to teach him my laborious soft-scrambled egg process. He watched impatiently on the side of the stove as I walked him through the steps. He didn’t listen. Instead, he tried to provide his own commentary for the steps I was demonstrating, which were not even remotely accurate. It ended with me yelling at him to leave me alone if he wasn’t going to treat the very serious business of soft-scrambled eggs with some respect.
The only thing we have in common is the type-A, neat freak personality I inherited from him. Despite him being white and my mom Asian, my dad is the militant one when it came to the No-Shoes-in-the-House rule. Many of our high school era fights began when I forgot something upstairs and had to run back in and didn’t take my shoes off before touching the carpet. After dinner, as the rest of us sat and conversed, he would routinely go throughout the kitchen armed with a broom and dustpan to clean up any fallen crumbs, proceeding to straighten up all our shoes in the entranceway. Eating in his car was forbidden because that meant the possibility of crumbs in impossible-to-reach places. Even my grandma, my dad’s mom, recalls exasperatedly that if she were to ever rearrange objects slightly in his childhood bedroom, he would become completely inconsolable.
I am the same in almost every way.
Almost without fail, my dad wakes up each morning with the sunrise. Growing up, on the rare Saturday morning when I was awake early, he would offer to make me eggs for breakfast. He only makes one kind. I would sit on one of the swivel chairs at our kitchen island and swing my legs back and forth as he worked at the stove. Over the pan of gurgling oil, he would crack four eggs perfectly next to one another, two for each of us. Next, he would cover the pan with a lid, and while the eggs finished cooking, pulled out two plates, salt, and pepper. He would put two eggs sprinkled with salt and pepper and a piece of wheat toast in front of each of us. His eggs are sunny side up, with slightly crispy edges and a runny yolk. It’s the only food he’s ever mastered.
Alaina Baumohl ‘23 studies in the College of Arts & Sciences. She can be reached at abaumohl@wustl. edu.