Top chefs are adding this special ingredient to their scrambled eggs

When I was a little girl, we kept chickens in our barn. We had so many eggs that our parents were always trying to give them away to family and friends. But this was back before backyard chickens were a thing, and people were a little weirded out by the fact that our eggs were brown, not white.

Needless to say, we always had a lot of eggs at our house. But that was okay by me. Scrambled, fried, deviled, soft-boiled… I never met an egg recipe I didn’t like. So when I heard about this new “secret” ingredient that everyone in the culinary world was adding to their scrambled eggs, I was instantly intrigued. What could this ingredient be? Where would I have to travel to find it? What dragons would I have to slay to reach it?

Um, it turns out all I had to do was open my fridge. ‘Cuz the secret ingredient? It’s soy sauce.

I’ve added everything to my eggs, from sour cream to matzo to ketchup. But though soy sauce is an item I almost always have in my pantry, it had never occurred to me to throw it into my eggs.

The idea behind the soy sauce is that it replaces the salt in the eggs. As we all know, soy sauce has a very salty taste to it that instantly brings a lot of flavor to any dish in which it’s used. But how would it taste on scrambled eggs? I decided to find out. So I scrambled four eggs in a bowl (and I used the yolks, too; let’s all stop pretending egg whites taste good). Then I added a splash of soy sauce and a bit of pepper.

I warmed a skillet and added a drop or two of sesame oil (I decided to use an Asian-inspired oil rather than butter to complement the soy sauce of the dish). Then I cooked the eggs for a few minutes, and voila! All done.

So how did it taste?

I loved it!

It was a nice departure from normal scrambled eggs, with lots of flavor and a nice salty bite. My husband didn’t know what I did differently, but he loved them as well. I usually eat scrambled eggs several times a week (with butter, cheese, matzo, and hot sauce), but now that I have this trick up my sleeve, I will definitely be making “soy sauce eggs” on a regular basis, too. Yum!

Don’t Forget To Watch Your Heat

Tom Colicchio best-known for his role on “Tom Chef” says one of the things many “amateur chefs” don’t understand is how to regulate the heat when they are cooking. In the case of scrambled eggs, he said many make the mistake of just turning the heat up and letting the eggs cook at one temperature the whole time.

If you find you are frequently overcooking your scrambled eggs, you’ll want to follow his advice for controlling the heat in your pan.

Check it out in the video below:

Other great tips from Colicchio? Keep whisking your eggs with a fork as they cook to get them light and fluffy. And make sure when you melt butter in the pan you warm it until it’s melted—not burnt!

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