You see it on sandwiches, and maybe as an off-the-wall ingredient in chocolate cake,
but would you really put this in your scrambled eggs? Alton Brown does.
It sounds gross, but keep watching, he might be onto something.
Scrambled eggs: a simple breakfast staple, right? Well, not exactly. It seems like
everyone has a different way of making them, a hack or ingredient — everything from heavy cream
to baking powder and even cornstarch — to take the basic scramble to another level.
Julia Child is on everyone's mind these days, so let's consider her scramble style.
According to Julia Child's Recipes, she favored a straightforward scramble with a French accent:
eight eggs plus salt and pepper, milk or water, plenty of butter for the cooking pan,
and an "enrichment" pat of butter or swirl of cream added at the very end.
"We're doing an egg-stravaganza today. All types of egg cooking."
"That's exciting."
Of course, there's great debate in the food world over whether to add water
or milk to one's eggs. Some say water will make the eggs light and fluffy,
while milk will weigh the eggs down. Alton Brown, the Food Network's resident food scientist,
likes to add enrichment to scrambled eggs using an unconventional ingredient: mayonnaise.
"She calls it a 'mayonegg.' Are you okay?" "I don't feel so good."
The veteran host of "Good Eats" introduced the mayonnaise-in-the-scramble concept in his book
"Everyday Cook." And the questionable ingredient came up again on a segment of
"Precise Advice with Alton Brown," a feature on "The Late Show with Stephen Colbert."
In the short segment loaded with fast-paced cooking knowledge,
Brown answered questions from viewers, and one person asked:
"How do I rebuild trust in you
after having learned you put mayonnaise in your scrambled eggs?"
Brown noted that scrambled eggs are an emulsion, or a smooth, homogenous mixture of fat and water.
"So mayonnaise is kind of like a booster to the emulsion that you're trying to make.
Just go with me on this. You can trust me."
One YouTube commenter endorsed Brown's advice, saying,
"Yes, adding mayonnaise to scrambled eggs increases the fat content
so that it smooths out the whites and makes the mixture form a creamy texture. Yum."
Some might look at him like he's a three-headed monster for suggesting stirring some mayonnaise
into scrambled eggs, but Alton Brown has a treasure trove of hacks. And fans appreciate them
because they're well thought out, well researched, and really work. In the words of one home cook,
who left a comment on the "Precise Advice with Alton Brown" video on YouTube:
"Other chefs tell you what to do; Alton explains how you can achieve what you want to get."
"These potatoes have now been simmering for a good half hour,
but that's not what matters. This is what matters."
Thanks to his journeyman experience as a cookbook author,
TV host, and home cook, Brown has a trick for just about everything.
When he's not tinkering with scrambled eggs and how to make them more velvety,
Brown has a hack for hard-cooked eggs, too. Rather than drop the eggs in a pot of boiling water,
the culinary scientist ditches most of the water and places a metal steamer basket in
the pan to cradle the eggs. Gentle steaming, he says, produces more tender hard-cooked eggs.
"Now that's what I'm talking about. Carpe ovum."
Culinary wizard though he may be,
Alton Brown isn't the only celebrity chef who's cracked the case on great eggs.
Celebrated chef Gordon Ramsay also has a different and slightly sophisticated take on scrambled eggs.
Ramsay calls his scrambled eggs "perfect," especially for weekends when time is less
of an issue. He starts by pan-roasting mushrooms and tomatoes from the vine to garnish the plate,
before moving on to the eggs. They're unconventional in several ways,
including Ramsay's own version of an "enrichment" towards the end of cooking.
First, the eggs are broken directly into the pan. Then Ramsay adds a generous slab
of butter — no water or milk — and blends the eggs and butter together on the heat using a spatula,
a technique he demonstrated on "Jimmy Kimmel Live."
"And keep it moving all the time, right?" "Now if you can just try…"
"Yes?" "And clean up
as you go along. Look, let go. Let go. F—, Jimmy. Up we go."
He takes the pan on and off the heat three or four times,
stirring all the while, before adding a spoonful of creme fraiche to the creamy-looking eggs.
Scrambled eggs isn't the dish that Ramsay says best represents him as a chef, but we'd start our
day with it in a heartbeat. And if you don't have any creme fraiche lying around, hey – grab a jar
of mayonnaise and give it a shot, like Alton Brown suggests. What's the worst that could happen?
Check out one of our newest videos right here! Plus,
even more Mashed videos about your favorite food hacks are coming soon.
Subscribe to our YouTube channel and hit the bell so you don't miss a single one.