You may have seen silicone molds for making pancakes and eggs. In my experience these are trash. The eggs or pancakes stick to them. Also, it’s terrifying to put something that looks like plastic on top of a hot frying pan. Instead, use a metal biscuit cutter. I used a 3.25” biscuit cutter, but a 3” or 3.5” one would also probably work fine.
Heat up your frying pan. I use a stainless steel fry pan (the New York Times wrote, more politely and at greater length, that nonstick pans are yucky.) Put the biscuit cutter in the middle, and add a nice big pat of butter (about half a tablespoon. Looks like butter soup? You’re on the right track).
How hot should the pan be?You don’t want to burn the egg, and you want the top part to cook. For this exercise, set the burner a teeny bit lower than you normally do when making fried eggs.
If your frying pan is flat (which it should be unless you’ve previously utilized* it as a weapon), most of the melted butter will stay inside the biscuit cutter. Then when you put the egg into the biscuit cutter, a little bit of butter will squeak up around the sides and will make it easier to take the biscuit cutter out without tearing the edges of your egg.
When the butter has melted, carefully crack the egg into the biscuit cutter. It’s helpful to first crack the egg into a small bowl or Pyrex measuring pitcher and then pour it from there into the biscuit cutter.
Cook the egg until the edges start to set. As soon as the edges have set, you can carefully lift out the biscuit cutter. Even if the top part of the egg is not cooked, the round shape will hold because the edges have already set. If you leave it too long, that’s when the egg starts to stick to the biscuit cutter and it ends up with ragged edges. (If this happens, you can run a knife around the edge of the cutter to free the egg. You may need to experiment with the amount of butter, how hot you heat the pan, etc. Breakfast craft develops over months and years, not minutes and days.)
For sunny-side-up eggs, put a lid on the top of the pan and cook until you’re happy. For over-easy, flip the egg over with a spatula just the same way as you would with regular eggs.
Bacon grease upgrade: If you’ve cooked bacon and want to fry the eggs in leftover bacon grease, you can carefully pour most of the grease into a smaller saucepan or cup and spoon a little bit of it into the biscuit cutter before adding your egg. The bacon grease will leak out the sides more readily than butter, but you’ll still have enough extra inside the biscuit cutter to keep the egg from sticking. Also, spoon a little of the hot grease over the top of your egg if you’re making it sunny-side up.
The only bummer: Most people only have one biscuit cutter in a particular size. If you’re cooking for more than one person, this isn’t all that sustainable. Ateco sells 3 inch biscuit cutters in sets of 12 for about 60 dollars. Want to split a set? Let me know.
Bonus: You’ve probably already guessed this, but if you use the same biscuit cutter to make homemade biscuits, you’ve got the perfect platform for a breakfast sandwich. Now if they only made bacon in the round…
*Check out the awesome and correct usage of the word utilized!
P.S. Now I’m hungry
