We’ve been taught to always cook eggs over low heat but recently, we found a recipe that called for cooking eggs over high heat. We found that intriguing. If we could cook eggs over high heat instead of low heat, it would make a quick meal even quicker. We decided to try it in the test kitchen.
We cooked eggs over both low heat and high heat (see note below) to see if it made a difference. We used the same recipe and the same pan and offered both to our testers. This is the recipe that we used:
Basic Scrambled Eggs
Ingredients
1 tablespoon butter
4 large eggs
1/4 cup milk
1/4 teaspoon salt
pepper
Directions
- Melt the butter in the nonstick pan.
- Whisk the eggs, milk, salt, and pepper together.
- When the butter is bubbly, pour the eggs into the hot pan. Stir frequently until the eggs are just done but moist looking. Do not overcook. Serve immediately.
As expected, the cooking time was much shorter with the high heat. The appearance was a little different: the curd was larger. But our testers could tell no difference between the high and low heat scrambled eggs and liked both equally.
We concluded that scrambled eggs could be cooked over high heat or low heat. High heat reduced cooking times substantially.
Baker’s note: What is “high heat”?
Every stove and every pan is a little different but think “medium high”, not very high. On our gas stove top, a setting of “8” was plenty high. Because heat is diffused more readily with clad pans, the heat should be a little lower with clad pans than with other pans.
