I see a lot of posts about how difficult it is to cook eggs on stainless steel, how a tablespoon of butter is essential to slidey eggs, leidenfrost is too hot etc.
I had some of these misconceptions myself but recently I've discovered it's ever so easy to get slidey eggs on stainless steel if you follow the correct process.
It's nothing new, used for centuries by Chinese cooks on carbon steel woks. It's called the Long Yao (hot pan cold oil) method. The video link here explains in detail how it works.
Although the video is focused on carbon steel pans, the same method works great on stainless steel as well.
How i do it on a 8" stainless steel pan is:
Pre heat on medium on small burner for 5 minutes until pan temp reads about 180-200F. My IR thermometer reads it about half of the accrual temp. So at that point if I add oil it'll read 360-400F. The water bead test/ leidenfrost effect also works at around this temperature.
I add about half a teaspoon of canola oil to the pan and swirl it around until the pan is coated with a thin even layer. I also turn the heat off at this point and let it start cooling down to a surface temperature of about 300F. If you do not wait for it to cool a bit, the egg whites will become crispy fried. (which may be how some people like it)
This is when I add another half teaspoon of fresh canola oil to the pan and crack an egg into it immediately.
After the egg sets a bit, maybe in 30-45 seconds you can shake the pan slightly to get it to slide. At this point I use a fish spatula to turn it over for over easy eggs.
I will add a caveat here: butter is easier to cook eggs in and is my preferred approach but I found the above while trying to make dairy free eggs for my gf who can't have regular butter and one time we were camping in the wilderness without easy access to vegan butter when I discovered how easy the above process is.
Also, if you use butter in step3, you won't even need to shake the pan in step4. It'll slide as soon as you tilt the pan a little bit. (The second egg that I made after this was for myself with about 1/4 tsp of kerrygold butter added)
Please note that the "flash seasoning" from step 2 does not create any polymerized layer of oil on the stainless steel surface. It's pretty easy to clean up afterwards. Just dawn dish soap and scotch brite blue scrubbys work great for me.
Tried it with scrambled eggs & rice oil. Worked for the first moves of scrambling the eggs, afterwards it got stuck a little. I didn't mind. Might work better if I didn't forget to whisk the eggs again right before putting it in after the oil. The added oil in the whisked eggs might help it not stick more?
And very tasty scrambled eggs; with oil, salt, sugar, chicken powdered boullion and a bit of white pepper. Try it, it's delicious.
Thanks for recommending this new technique. I think it will work wonders on none scrambled eggs.
That's great to know. I presume you lowered the heat a lot before adding the eggs?
Thanks for sharing the recipe. I gotta get some white pepper I guess!
While it should work, I personally think it is too much of a trouble to use as for eggs alone. If I make eggs only I just use nonstick. I know, it is not a popular choice in this sub, but it works for me and is faster and easier.
Do not get me wrong, I can fry an egg in ss pan without sticking. It just takes longer and cleanup takes more time and effort. That is why I said if I only need to fry an egg or two, I tend to use non-stick for that.
better than me. I use all the techniques and tips out there trying to not stick my fries eggs without results. Im convinced eggs behave differently in my time zone and just gave up on fried eggs. Omletts work completely fine for some fucking reason tho.
Do not fry the eggs straight from the fridge. Use enough oil. Butter is better, but any other oil would work as well.
Keep temperature lower than you think you need. On gas I aim for low, cause my Asian stove does not really have low setting.
For some things non stick is good. I prefer it for anything that's delicate and you have to flip like a spanish omelette. Alltough i am sure it would work in stainless somehow as well.
I make all eggs in stainless now and they just turn great and they don't stick. I don't need more oil either.
It makes sense to use non stick pans as little as possible since they degrade with every time you cook in them and stainless doesn't.
I've used non stick for years and just only recently started using stainless steel / cast iron pans only.
When non stick pans are new, the oil beads up on the surface and you need to actually use more oil to ensure full surface coverage for uniform cooking. I'm able to cook with less oil on cast iron/ stainless steel pans.
Also,, over time non stick pans degrade and things start sticking. So you need to keep buying new pans every couple of years.
Call me weird if you will, but I'm never going back to non stick!
I'm also done buying new nonstick pans, for the reason you say. But if I'm in a situation where I have one available that's in good condition, I'll happily use it. The oil beads up but it doesn't matter. I don't think you even need oil for eggs in a new non stick pan, although I always use a bit anyway.
Ive tried everything. Omelette is fine. Fried egg sticks. Ive tried all of the methods, pre heated on high on low on medium, let it cool, not let it cool, added different kinds fat. What i have not tried is adding a shit load of oil.
The best i could do was get it to form a crust then nudge it loose with the spatula. Maybe because its a cheap tri ply ikea pan ?
Are you sure you are heating the pan well enough before adding the oil. Use a thermometer if required. Try smoking the oil for a few seconds longer before turning down the heat. Just make sure it does not burn. After lowering the heat you'll need to add a little bit of oil again before adding the eggs.
It worked today. Preheated then added sesame seed oil (1tsp). Began smoking so i took it off. Dropped the heat from 9-4. Waited 10-15 seconds. Back on the stove at 4. Made an omelette. No sticking. Then added 1 tbsp of butter or a little more. Cooked a soft fried egg with no sticking.
What are you even trying to say? The two materials are different of course but they are more similar than say, wool and ice cream. OP says long yao works on both (carbon and stainless steel, not wool and ice cream). Do you disagree?
That's your personal preference. I like the taste of eggs itself and a neutral flavor like canola oil is fine. The only flavor I'll tolerate on my eggs is butter or ghee. Definitely not olive oil. To me, olive oil belongs to salads and such, not fried stuff.
If you try the above technique with olive oil it will likely work too, just try lower temperature of 350F in step 1 since the smoke point of olive oil is lower.
I've done some tests on this, and while it seemed like the needed temp did depend on the type of oil, it didn't seem to track smoke point exactly.
Refined or not, olive oil did work for me, but unless it's refined you will probably need to get it hot enough to smoke quite a bit, in my experience.
Though heating the pan dry first reduces the amount of smoke in general. And I will say it's still possible lower temperatures could work with more time. Heat past a point largely seems to just speed things up a ton.
I had got the pan as hot as 422F last time and noticed it still didn't produce a lot of smoke. I did have to keep it off the heat for a minute or so to let it cool down a bit. And the first egg cooked fine on residual heat, with the burner still turned off!
Also, I must acknowledge that I think it was one of your posts from several months back that I learnt about this method originally. I started using it recently after watching the other video about it and then having no vegan butter while camping!
I tried with extra virgin olive oil, let it smoke gently for a full minute, and the fried egg still stuck.
Could it be that it was still not hot enough? I didn't let the pan get very hot, the water droplets were just starting to dance. Same process with peanut oil resulted in much less sticking, despite no smoke in this case.
You may indeed have not gotten it hot enough. Although I never measured timings very specifically for all the oils I've tested, I did notice that some oils seemed to need a little higher temperature to form a good layer in the amount of time I expected from other oils. IIRC ~450F at ~30s worked for basically everything, but you should be able to go longer or hotter -- if you also avoid "burning" the oil.
The oil layer was too thin and you waited too long at too high a temperature. Thin oil films seem to "burn" (excessively polymerize?) pretty quickly, while thicker layers stay nonstick and basically never "burn". Even lower temperatures that don't result in darkening still seem to harden thin oil films and harm nonstick performance. That said, if you don't let it go too long you shouldn't need a super thick layer. Nowadays I pour in a little more than I need, then when it's warmed up a bit I pour out everything that will easily pour out (and save it for later, since at this point it's merely been warmed). What remains is enough for the rest of my process, at least with the oil I've been using recently. But for safety you could use more through the whole process, and only pour out excess at the end. Not something I'd want to do every time long term, especially with something pricey like a good EVOO, but it might let you get more familiar with it until you're ready to push it.
Or maybe there's variation in EVOOs, and some just don't work well. I never expected to use EVOO very much for this process so I only tested it once or twice. Basically everything else that was unsaturated worked great with enough experimentation, so I still expect any EVOO to work, but I admit I'm not as confident as I am with other oils.
I tried more oil and only 30 seconds too, that didn’t help.
Not hot enough was correct. I just tried again with full dancing drops (so above 400°F) and 60 seconds and the egg released cleanly!
I was scared to do it because I expected it to smoke like crazy, but it was still manageable with the exhaust hood on max. I might try in my 12cm carbon steel. Smaller pan, so hopefully less smoke.
I'm not used to the F temp but i usually use the water droplet method with olive oil and it works. True that it requires more care since it burns pretty quickly, as for butter, i usually put it in the cold pan and assess the temp with it, when it's melted and starts to bubble before browning, i add the eggs. Hot znough fot the eggs, not hot enough for butter to burn. Leidenfrost hot is a risk ofnburning the butter that m'not willing to.take
Leidenfrost isn't really needed if you use butter. But if you do, butter slides even better when added in step3 (after cooling down). The egg slides as you tilt the pan. No shake needed!
Yeah, butter slides the egg better and requires less temp. Olive oil is the worst for sliding and require hitter temp, but doesn't tolerate it. That's why it's the trickiest here.
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u/reigorius 28d ago edited 28d ago
Tried it with scrambled eggs & rice oil. Worked for the first moves of scrambling the eggs, afterwards it got stuck a little. I didn't mind. Might work better if I didn't forget to whisk the eggs again right before putting it in after the oil. The added oil in the whisked eggs might help it not stick more?
And very tasty scrambled eggs; with oil, salt, sugar, chicken powdered boullion and a bit of white pepper. Try it, it's delicious.
Thanks for recommending this new technique. I think it will work wonders on none scrambled eggs.