J. Kenji López-Alt Combines 2 Tips For Creamy Scrambled Eggs
When it comes to making scrambled eggs, texture is just as important as taste. You can add the perfect amount of salt and all the right spices, but without the proper cooking technique, the texture can suffer. If you want your eggs to be light and creamy every time, the method that chef and food columnist J. Kenji López-Alt shared on YouTube may be the most foolproof approach because he combines two different tips for the best possible results.
The first tip López-Alt says he learned from food blogger Lady and Pups. This entails beating eggs with a slurry of milk and cornstarch. In her blog post, Lady and Pups actually recommends using potato starch if you have it. López-Alt reiterates that this is the most ideal option because it activates at a faster rate. But no matter what type of starch you use, combining it with eggs does two things: It forces the starch to bind with the protein in the eggs to prevent them from becoming watery and gives them a custardy texture with hardly any effort.
Cold butter is a must for J. Kenji López-Alt's scrambled eggs
When you add the milk and starch slurry to your scrambled eggs, don't transfer it to the pan just yet. Instead, at this point, J. Kenji López-Alt employs a method used at a sandwich shop in Brookline, Massachusetts called Cutty's, which is owned by his friend and chef Charles Kelsey. According to López-Alt, Kelsey's technique was originally adapted from French chef Daniel Boulud, and per Gourmet Magazine, involves dicing up cold butter and mixing it right into the raw eggs.
Using cold butter, López-Alt explained in the YouTube video, allows for better temperature control of the eggs. "As the eggs cook, they create these sort of little localized pockets of cooler eggs so that you get a really nice sort of textural contrast," López-Alt shared. When the eggs are done, they have a decadent and creamy, almost sauce-like texture, and it's all thanks to the cornstarch and cold butter.