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I’m tired of buying a new non-stick pan every other year, so I decided to try cooking eggs in stainless steel instead. I’ve been practicing for a few months now, and figured I’d record what’s working (and not working) for me in case someone else has been thinking about it.

Fried Eggs

Cooking Method

For fried eggs I’m using Kenji’s first method in this video:

This yields soft fried eggs — I don’t especially like the crunchy bitties and have had trouble cooking fried eggs consistently for decades, so this method suits me. I like my eggs done over medium.

I use a 10″ skillet for four fried eggs.

1. put stainless steel skillet on medium heat (5 on my electric coil stove that goes to 10)
2. add butter to the pan — melt across the pan bottom (doesn’t have to be fully melted when you add the eggs)
3. crack in four eggs
4. sprinkle with salt
5. pour in a splash of hot water (I use leftover water from the kettle, probably a tablespoon more or less, and pour it in the middle where it won’t disturb the yolks)
6. cover and set a timer for 1 minute — cook till whites are set and yolks are to your preference (if you haven’t gotten distracted like me and let the pan heat up for a while first, over medium will probably take ~2 1/2 minutes — I always check at 1 minute and adjust timing accordingly)

With this method I’ll sometimes get a little rim of cooked egg white stuck on the wall of the pan, especially if I haven’t done a good job getting some butter on there, but it scrapes off pretty easy. (Used to have these plastic ones, now I have a bamboo pan scraper.)

Challenges

If I’m trying to do something else at the same time, I’m almost guaranteed to overdo them because they usually seem to need 30 more seconds but my kitchen timer does 1 minute intervals 😉 Have I stopped trying to do other stuff at the same time? … no.

Sometimes a couple eggs will be done before the other two — I might scoop out the finished eggs and give the others another thirty seconds with the lid on, or I’ll flip the not-quite-done eggs to finish them with the heat of the pan.

Scrambled Eggs

I don’t like the tiny curd style scrambled eggs that you get from stirring the whole time, I prefer larger curds, only just cooked (the photo above is a little more done than my preference).

Cooking Method

I use a 12″ skillet for four scrambled eggs. I use a metal spatula. People on YouTube seem to do fine with silicone but whenever I use it it sticks for me.

1. put stainless steel pan on medium (5 on my electric coil stove)
2. let it heat up for several minutes without fat in it — till water flicked in the pan skitters over the surface as little balls, rather than evaporating instantly — on my stove this is like 3+ minutes
3. while the pan is heating, crack four eggs into a bowl, add 1/4 tsp kosher salt, and whisk
4. turn the heat down a smidge (to 4)
5. add neutral oil to the hot pan and tilt to coat the bottom fully and some of the inside lip (make sure all your test water has evaporated or it might spit at you when you add the oil)
6. pour in the scrambled egg mix — it should start to set at the edges right away (see “challenges” below — you might like to pull the pan off the heat while you add the eggs)
7. drag the cooked edges in towards the center with a spatula (push or pull works), working your way around the pan
8. continue to cook and keep moving the cooked edges back into the middle, piling it all up there
9. cook until everything is starting to hold shape — this should be pretty quick, 30 seconds to a minute — then turn the heat off and finish to your preference with residual heat (I like my eggs on the moist side)

Challenges

Initially I found that the eggs cooked too much in the time it took me to put the bowl in the sink and rinse my fingers — and I really hate the “eggy” flavor of well-cooked eggs (can’t stand frittatas).

I’ve started taking the pan off the heat to add the eggs, then putting it back on the heat — if it cools off too much, then it starts to stick (see photo below).

I worry that biology will have a strong attacker-defender asymmetry, where sufficiently capable models may be able to quickly weaponize pandemic-level viruses with widely available materials, whereas defense against these agents is a multi-year operational task in the best case (as we saw with Operation Warp Speed).

Last year I read the book The Optimist about Sam Altman. I wonder if there should be a complementary book about Dario Amodei called The Pessimist. I don't entirely mean that as a joke, or even as criticism... We do need people who are a check on runaway enthusiasm. Dario is well suited to this role because of his time at OpenAI and his excellent essay Machines of Loving Grace, with its more uplifting tone. But there has to be balance, and currently I find the fear exhausting.

Totally reasonable. In fact, the new OpenAI data center in Georgia announced last week has this partially baked in, saying they will "proactively reduce its power consumption before residential customers are impacted during periods of high demand".

One common refrain I’d hear everywhere I went whether they dealt in pizzas, coffee, coupons, computers, or software licenses went something like this (paraphrasing), “On average customers use our product once per month and if we can double that number then we’d have no more problems.” An over-simplification of course, but they’re desperate to move the number from one… to two.

It doesn’t take a business degree to figure that out that doubling your sales, downloads, or clicks is good for business. But sometimes the goals are much more modest. Let’s say it’s coffee. They know they have you hooked on a drug and you’ll make at least four weekly purchases a month, but if they could get all their customers to buy a fifth cup of coffee that month… that’s a measly five bucks for you and I the consumer, but that’s +20% revenue month-over-month for their store.

Putting this knowledge into the hands of consumers like us… Our five bucks feels meaningless and this feels like impotent advice on the purchasing power of the dollar, but I know it matters. Those five bucks can and will skew the averages and the people wearing Patagonia vests in mahogany-paneled board rooms will obsess over those charts.

Collectively we can influence the number chart. It could be a coordinated buying campaign or boycott, but I think it could be as simple as re-patronizing small businesses you already enjoy.

• Double your purchases from that shop you liked, even if it’s a little too expensive because you understand they deal in small volumes.
• Go to that local restaurant you like again, the one where the owner comes out and shakes everyone’s hand.
• Buy another online course with your company’s education budget from that online helpful person, even if you’ll never use it.
• Watch one more video, read one more post, like it, subscribe. And don’t block the ads.

And the inverse is also true…

• Make one less order from that big online retailer funneling dark money into our elections.
• Cancel your subscription to companies owned by race-baiting ketamine-addled nazis.
• Make one less post on the billionaire owned platform, delete the app, let your session expire.

And sometimes, you don’t even need to buy anything! Often, talking about the places you like has the biggest impact. Talking raises awareness, it puts good things and places in our collective consciousness. It won’t be instant, but hopefully we can reprogram our muscle memory to think of good company before giving money to bad company.

Bad companies pay a lot of ad-bucks to other bad companies to get into your field of view. Ads are why websites have gone to shit. It’s why Instagram has become unusable, not to mention that it’s become a giant multi-level marketing scam where it’s all influencers hustling their dropshipped garbage to each other instead of sharing cool photos with friends.

Become a free, one-off marketing department or brand ambassador for a restaurant, app, podcast, artist, game, band, or store that you think is good. No one is going to think “Damn, Dave keeps talking about these breakfast tacos at Dan’s Hamburgers in Austin, TX that are only available before 10:30 am, they must be complete shit.” They will be curious and figure it out for themselves and their lives will be forever changed until the day Dan’s gets swallowed up by Austin’s endless “progress”.

In the wake of a phalanx of tech billionaires shit-grinning behind an orange-hued fascist criminal who four years prior incited a coup in that same rotunda, some Europeans have began advocating for local technology solutions. And even though these European alternative sites post a slight existential threat to my family’s income, I love the initiative. I wish every continent, country, city, and state had similar efforts to drive money towards locally sourced alternatives. I’m guilty of it as well, but why we funnel so much money to five nearly identical technology companies boggles the mind.

Anyways. Consider doubling your business somewhere with. some place or someone that deserves it. And the smaller that business is, the even bigger impact you’ll have on the number chart.