Burnt Eggs
After high school, instead of taking a year off or heading straight into undergrad, I moved across the country and went to culinary school. (The early 2000's were a different time kids.) Our first semester kitchen class was all foundations: knife skills, the five mother sauces, every shape a potato can become, the art of flipping whatever was in your pan without launching it across the room. To learn these lessons we cooked, and in every imaginable way ruined roughly a metric ton of eggs, zucchini, and potatoes.
One of the first things we had to master was the flip. The test was simple: send two eggs into the air at the same time, catch them without breaking the yolks, serve to Chef. I found myself to be particularly uncoordinated with a hot pan, so I started coming to class early for extra practice. Fun fact: early, in kitchen time, meant four in the morning.
This particular morning I had convinced myself that this would finally be the day I defeated my poultry based nemesis. I pulled my assigned pan from the rack, plonked it down on my favorite burner, added a spoonful of clarified butter, cracked in two eggs, and watched them like my life depended on it. The whites were settling into that perfect silky bounce. The edges were behaving. The pan felt responsive in my hand. It was time.
Muttering “You’re a big girl, you can do this” under my breath, I lifted the pan, flicked my wrist, and was suddenly holding a three foot tower of flames.
I had set my eggs on fire.
On. Fire.
I don’t know why but I didn’t drop the pan. I didn’t jump back. I just turned off my burner and waited for the flames to die down, singeing myself slightly in the process.
Of course Chef saw the whole thing and I braced for the kind of yelling that only exists in professional kitchens. Except he didn’t yell (which of course, was worse). He sat me down, tended to my hand, slipped the still smoking eggs onto a tasting plate, and handed me a fork.
My punishment was to eat what I had made while Chef explained exactly what had happened and how to make sure it never happened again.
While I bargained with my stomach to accept its carbonized breakfast, Chef explained that my critical mistake happened long before the eggs caught fire. When I took my pan off the rack I didn’t check to make sure it was dry before I put it on the burner. Because I didn’t bother to look, I didn’t notice the water droplets gathered on the surface. I was going on my assumption that it had dried overnight from when I put it away the day previously. What I didn’t know was that the pastry students had come in even earlier than I had, made their breakfast, washed the pans, and put them back damp.
When I added my butter and eggs, a pocket of steam was sealed in underneath the setting proteins. When I tried to flip them, the buttery trapped steam escaped, caught the burners flame, et voila: burnt eggs.
It’s been nearly twenty years, and I still make sure to check my pan. I also haven’t forgotten the larger lesson eighteen-year-old me learned that morning: most disasters don’t start where they finally appear. The real issue is usually tucked inside something aggressively ordinary: a drop of water, a tired assumption, a detail we were sure didn’t matter. But what’s stayed with me most was realizing how far a little care early on can carry us, how it can teach us to keep the day steady before anything has a chance to ignite.
It’s a small thing, but somehow comforting.
Because nobody wants burnt eggs.
