People Have Mixed Feelings About This Viral Tik Tok Fried Egg Hack

Since TikTok entered the social media landscape, its users have uncovered some truly genius hacks, including this one for making snack-sized plastic bags out of larger bags (because who has the room to stock their kitchen with a variety of sizes of plastic bags?) and this one for keeping your salad crisp (because wilted salad is a hard pass, thank you very much). 

Most recently, we caught wind of this, from TikTok user 3136491744604, who on April 1, 2021, presented a clever hack for cooking sunny-side-up eggs. Aimed at eliminating that icky, gelatinous goo that would otherwise end up covering your sunny-side up eggs — but without requiring you to flip them (because then they'd just be "fried eggs" and not "sunny-side-up eggs" and that defeats the whole purpose, no?), the hack involves pouring a small amount of water into the pan after the eggs are nearly cooked and then covering the pan with a steamer-lid. 

The result? Goo-free fried eggs. Yes, it's clever. In fact, we'll go so far as to say it's genius. But the response on TikTok has been far from uniformly positive. Here's why people are having some mixed feelings about this latest viral TikTok fried egg hack.

Nobody ever heard of basted eggs until now?

In 2019, the The New York Times announced that TikTok would soon be rewriting the world. What they were referring to was their belief that TikTok's 15-second video platform could take social media junkies to places previously unimaginable. Two years later, the headline still tracks, but for a different reason — at least from our perspective. 

You see, lately it seems that some TikTok users aren't really presenting anything new at all, but rather, are recycling old material. Some of the TikTok hacks we're seeing are hacks we've not only seen before, but actually used before. Sometimes, they're even hacks we actually thought of ourselves. And people are having feelings about this, and by "feelings" we really mean "mixed feelings." 

"Basted eggs is not a new thing!!!" wrote TikTok user 31614346782259 in response to user 3136491744604's 15-second fried egg hack. "Thought that was common knowledge," said a second user, while another revealed, "Small amount of water. Been doing that for decades." And so it appears that TikTok is, indeed, rewriting the world, but not necessarily in the way that may have been previously envisioned.