Don’t Ruin Your Scrambled Eggs by Adding Salt at the Wrong Time

Don’t Ruin Your Scrambled Eggs by Adding Salt at the Wrong Time

If you’re a cooking fan, chances are you’ve heard of the culinary guru that is J. Kenji López-Alt. He’s the author of The Food Lab; writes for the New York Times and has had many a viral cooking moment.

We’ve written about his cooking hacks a few times before (here’s his secret to perfect scrambled eggs).

As a quality chef should, López-Alt knows his way around an egg, and recently one of his tips in this space has been getting a lot of attention by way of a lovely little write up in Bon Appetit. That tip comes from The Food Lab, but also gets a special mention in one of his New York Times columns ‘This Is How You Get the Best Scrambled Eggs’.

López-Alt’s genius tip, dear friends, is that you must salt your scrambled eggs at the correct time.

When’s the right time to salt your scrambled eggs?

As López-Alt wrote for the NYT, the advice in this space is varied. “Some chefs insist that you not salt your eggs until they are nearly finished cooking, while others recommend salting as you beat them,” he states.

His suggestion is that you should salt your eggs as you beat them, then allow the mixture to sit for about 10 or 15 minutes. Approaching it this way, López-Alt says, tends to leave you with scrambled eggs that “retain moisture better and stay more tender than unsalted eggs”.

Want creamier eggs? Add butter while beating

Another hack, one that López-Alt learnt from Charles Kelsey, is to blend your raw eggs with butter before scrambling.

“As the butter eventually melts, it mixes with that softer egg forming a rich, buttery sauce that mingles with and coats the firmer curds,” he writes.

The main scramble sin he wants you to avoid, however, is overcooking those babies. So keep a keen eye when cooking and you’ll end up with the perfect batch of scrambled eggs.

Want more advice? Here’s a video guide to making scrambled eggs by López-Alt:


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