Common part of a breakfast meal. Usually accompanied by fried bacon or sausage. Fried eggs come in many varieties, including Over Hard, Over Medium, Over Easy, and Sunny Side Up.

How to make Fried Eggs:

Ingredients:

Utensils:

Instructions:

  1. Heat up a frying pan to a reasonable temperature, between medium and medium high.
  2. Crack between 1 and 3 eggs over the pan, carefully avoiding dumping eggshell into the mixture. If you do not feel comfortable doing this, you may crack the eggs over a bowl and then carefully pour the contents onto the frying pan.
  3. Cook for however long it takes for them to be cooked. This is usually for how ever long it takes for the egg white to have solidified thoroughly and the yolk to have sealed up.
  4. Variations
    1. For sunny side up eggs, when you heat up the pan, throw some vegetable oil in there too. LordOmar also suggests that you may use butter instead of vegetable oil.When the eggs are almost done, take a spatula and splash the hot oil (BE VERY CAREFUL WHEN YOU DO THIS) from the pan onto the top of the eggs where the yolks are so that the tops seal up. After the tops are sealed up, remove from pan carefully, as the eggs are fragile and you don't want to give anyone a runny mess.
    2. For any of the Over varieties, when the eggs are just about done, flip over carefully and cook to taste.

Salt and Pepper may be added right after cracking the eggs to add flavor.

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Fried eggs are the ultimate fast food. They're done in minutes, are more nutritious than Burger King and you don't have to stand in line to get them. Assuming of course you have some in your fridge.

One advantage to frying eggs is that you can instantly see how fresh they are as soon as you drop them in the pan. The more the egg white spreads in the pan, the older the eggs are. Fresh eggs have a well-defined thick, oval layer of white and a small thin fringe.

Ideally they should be fried in olive oil unless they're to be combined with fatty food on the plate in which case, being lighter, corn or soybean oil is more suitable. Never fry your eggs in cheap or bastardised vegetable oil, you lose both taste and the antioxidants found in good oil. Using grease or margarine is a culinary crime, period--don't do it, OK? You may, however, use the fat from the bacon you just fried. Don't use too little or too much oil. The oil should fully but only just cover the bottom of the pan before the eggs are added.

Fry at medium heat, slightly on the hot side. If the oil isn't hot enough the eggs will cook too slowly and the fringes of the whites will end up tough by the time the insides are done. If you're afraid of getting burnt by hot bubbles bursting from underneath the eggs, make a slit in the place where you see the bubble forming. It's also my very personal opinion that sunny side up is the only way to fry an egg but that's open to debate. When there's just a thin halo of runny, transparent white surrounding the yolk, spoon hot oil from the rest of the pan over the eggs until the yolks have a whitish hue. This means they're done.

Eggs fried in olive oil make a great tasting fast meal. It is imperative that bread be available for dunking though, it's not half as good without. A simple, tasty and healthy lunch could consist of no more than eggs fried in olive oil, a hunk of good bread (Wonder bread is an insult to good oil) and a sliced tomato sprinkled with oregano. The tomato itself combines beautifully with the olive oil.

Alternatively, you can simply put fried eggs, fried in light vegetable oil and sufficiently drained, on a slice of toast (again, Wonderbread is out of the question) with real butter and accompany it with fresh vegetables such as sliced cucumber or place a lettuce leaf on the toast. For a less healthy option, place slices of ham and cheese on a plate, put the eggs on top and let the heat melt the cheese. Good with baked beans.

Salt and pepper may be added during cooking or afterwards. Ketchup is a matter of taste or religious preference of course. If you ask me, ketchup does not belong on good fried eggs. It's also acidy and does not always combine well with oil. On the other hand, it's almost mandatory with chips/french fries. It's entirely up to you. At any rate, bon appétit.

Dedicated to Gone Jackal, egg lover extraordinaire.

A general note about fried eggs: what you fry them in greatly affects the taste (this goes for regular sunny side up fried eggs, over easy or any of its variations, scrambled eggs, omelets --- or omelettes, if you prefer that spelling --- and anything else involving eggs and hot fat stuff in a frying pan).

Now the first question to ask about the aforementioned hot fat stuff is How Much? That's going to depend on how many eggs you're making, and how big your pan is. You get pretty good at eyeballing this kind of thing after a few tries, but a good rule of thumb is that you want the frying surface coated so the eggs don't stick, but you also don't want them to float.

The next question (and the reason I wrote this) is: What kind? If you like bacon and/or sausage, go ahead and make those first, and fry your eggs in the grease. Just be careful not to let the grease burn, unless you like your eggs with an extra-smoky flavor. And the no-floating-eggs rule is important here; if you've got a ton of grease, drain some out of the pan before tossing in the eggs (and go see bacon grease for ideas about what to do with any leftovers you don't cook eggs in).

In my experience, eggs are generally fried in butter or margarine. Both of these are excellent, but again affect the taste of the final concoction. Margarine (or whatever vegetable oil-based spread you subscribe to) tends to make eggs crispier around the edges than butter does. It also has a much higher likelihood of overheating and burning a little, again giving your eggs a vaguely charcoaly taste. If you're like me (and I know I am --- sorry, couldn't resist) this can be an added bonus: I tend to let my eggs, especially omelets, get good and brown, and letting the fat get especially hot in the pan before adding eggs counts as a head start in that direction.

Finally, there's olive oil. I've only started using this for eggs recently, but it adds a wonderful robustness to the overall flavor of the eggs. Also, if you're making an omelet with, say, mushrooms or onions, it's nice to sauté them a bit beforehand, and again, olive oil tends to bring out the flavor of the vegetables more than butter or margarine would.

Afterthought: Go read the advice in sensei's A Good Egg. He writes the truth.

How to fry perfect eggs every time

For one of the simplest and most nutritious meals, fried eggs can also be one of the trickiest to get just right.

The trick to getting a nice soft and runny yolk, with the surrounding white albumen properly set, and a cooked-but-not-burnt base can be quite difficult for the novice.

The following technique will guarantee perfectly set sunny side up fried eggs in under two minutes.

Equipment

  • A smallish frying pan (non-stick coated if available)
  • A saucepan lid large enough to cover the frying pan
  • A spatula

Ingredients

Method

  1. Pour one gram of olive oil into the frying pan. This is a tiny amount: only enough to cover a small coin.
  2. Put the pan onto the stove top and heat to a high temperature (say 30 to 45 seconds).
  3. With the spatula, smear the hot oil over the surface of the frying pan. It should spread readily and leave the pan glistening.
  4. Crack your eggs into the centre of the frying pan, and immediately pour in the water (the equivalent of four soup spoonsful of water is adequate).
  5. Put the saucepan lid on the pan, sealing in the steam produced by the water, and immediately turn the heat down to the lowest setting.
  6. In approximately 30 to 45 seconds, remove the lid and take the pan off the heat.

Your eggs will be perfectly cooked top to bottom, with a slightly set yolk. They will slip immediately from the pan, as the steam vapour will have worked its way under the eggs, slightly raising the eggs from the oiled pan while they were cooking. Also, the steam will have properly set the egg whites. The frying pan will be easy to clean, with no burnt-on egg.

Slip your eggies onto buttered toast and enjoy!

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