The Egg Dish José Andrés Never Orders At A Restaurant

For a food so seemingly simple, eggs sure do carry a lot of baggage with them. Some people get confused by choosing the right type of egg for baking, be it large or medium, white or brown, cold or room temperature. Others may spend what feels like hours staring at the refrigerator case in the store trying to decide between cage-free, free-range, pasture-raised, and organic eggs. Still more just want to know when, if ever, egg prices might finally be going down.

But one of the oldest egg debates in the books is how best to cook them. Ask any elite chef how to make an omelet, from the late Julia Child to Food Network star Bobby Flay, and chances are they'll have a very specific answer — one that's likely different from one culinary elite to another. But omelets aren't the only egg dish that chefs could debate for eternity without ever coming to a consensus. For some chefs, the best method for cooking fried eggs is even more controversial, and José Andrés is so particular about how he likes fried eggs to be made that he won't even order them from a restaurant.

José Andrés is a chef known for his modernist Spanish cuisine, his appearances on various cooking shows over the years, and his charity work with World Central Kitchen. But if you ever wanted to take him out to breakfast to thank him for his contributions, don't expect him to order fried eggs. "Nobody knows how to make fried eggs," he said in a Yahoo!Life interview. According to Andrés, the only way to make sure that a fried egg will be tasty is if he makes them himself. Specifically, he likes to "add salt around the edge of the egg white that's in contact with the egg yolk," which helps the egg firm up more quickly. 

Andrés is known for his Spanish olive oil-fried eggs method , which Michelin-starred chef Eric Ripert once even called "very impressive" on Instagram. Andrés' method calls for frying eggs in a pan of smoking-hot olive oil. In an appearance on "The Late Show With Stephen Colbert," Andrés shared that key to making his fried eggs is to keep the pan tilted at an angle while they cook, so they rest right in the puddle of hot oil (via YouTube). The resulting eggs have fluffy, puffy whites that are golden-brown on the outside, and have a runny yolk inside. Safe to say, it's not the kind of egg Andrés is likely to recieve when ordering breakfast at your average American diner.