Gordon Myers
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The Ten-Egg Challenge: Part 8
Day 8: Over Medium
You may recall that I originally attempted to cook over medium on day 6, but it accidentally turned out as over hard instead. Today I tried again - and again, and again. This morning I woke up, put in 45 minutes on the elliptical machine, took a shower, and then tried to cook myself a breakfast of an over medium egg. Unfortunately, as soon as I sliced it open with a knife, I saw right away that my first attempt was actually an over easy egg. D'oh. So onto take 2. After thoroughly washing everything and starting fresh, I tried again with a second egg. (My egg flipping skills are quite good now, by the way!) The results? Over easy again. D'oh. Not that over easy is wrong - in fact it made for a very tasty breakfast...twice - it's just not what I wanted to do. Finally though, the third time was the charm. This afternoon I tried again and came out with what I will consider to be a successful over medium egg. And regarding my two failed attempts this morning, you know what they say... you can't make an omelette without cracking a few eggs first.
And I'll show myself out.
Here's what you'll need to make an over medium egg:
- A frying pan,
- A spatula,
- Some butter, and
- An egg
This is still the same list of requirements for both over easy and over hard of course. Grease the pan with copious amounts of butter, and heat it up to a medium-high heat. I've given that instruction ("use copious amounts of butter") on a couple of different challenge days now, so in case you were wondering what I mean by that, I've showcased a photo of the pan with butter freshly applied to it above. That's my definition of copious. Of course once the heat gets going it starts to melt and you want to make sure it gets spread over the whole surface of the pan. Then, crack the egg open and wait for about a minute and a half. That will be when the egg whites have fully solidified and then some. Then give 'er a flip! And from there wait exactly one minute, at which point you promptly turn the burner off and transfer the egg onto a serving plate.
On my first two attempts earlier this morning, I had tried this on a medium heat (which is the same instruction I gave for over hard on day 6). But since both of those turned out under-done, I just decided to crank up the heat on the stovetop to medium-high instead, and thankfully that did it. An over easy egg is all goo in the center; an over hard egg is all fluffy stuff, while an over medium is (not surprisingly) half and half. You'll have some goo, and some cooked yolk too. On day 6, when I cooked the over hard egg, I actually did have a few drops of goo there, too. But, it was so little that I don't think anyone would have taken me seriously had I tried to pass that off as over medium, so it just got designated over hard.
The results? Decent. I think I preferred the two accidental over easy eggs I had for breakfast this morning over the final over medium egg this afternoon, as the closer the yolks get to being hard boiled, the less I like them. The exception of course is with scrambled eggs, but that's probably mostly due to the fact that the egg white is mixed in there as well. With two bad eggs along the way, so far over medium has proved the most challenging. And honestly, I still think I did a pretty poor job. As you can see in some of the pictures, the edges started to brown - which was due entirely to the higher heat. So I think I'll just leave over medium to the professionals, and hope that I don't have a daughter or son one day who picks over medium as their favorite. I give it a 5 out of 10. Other things I learned today: Christmas shopping is expensive! The bill from the post office, for just the Christmas cards plus stamps alone was over $100! I love sharing cards with friends though, so it's all worth it. 
Check back tomorrow for the penultimate egg challenge. Only two days left! What will I cook up next?