Alex Guarnaschelli’s Best Scrambled Eggs Recipe Is ‘Super Simple’ and Takes Just Seconds to Cook

A serving of creamy, pillowy scrambled eggs is a breakfast winner each time. But when it’s done wrong, it can turn out to be a dry letdown.

Food Network star Alex Guarnaschelli demystifies making scrambled eggs that are a success every time. Here are her tips and tricks for the deceptively simple dish.

Guarnaschelli explains why eggs are great for young cooks

The Italian-American chef writes in her cookbook Cook with Me: 150 Recipes for the Home Cook of her fond memories learning to cook with her parents.

“Eggs are the best food to start cooking with your kids,” she says. “Scrambling, frying, soft-boiling. Eventually, you graduate to the complex and exciting world of poached eggs, quiche, and béarnaise sauce.”

Her mother, she added, was the one who “ironically … was always the one to scramble or fry the eggs in the morning.

“She would melt butter and pour in the eggs, stirring methodically, and always added a few dashes of Worcestershire and Tabasco along with a pinch of salt. … My dad would time the toast to her stirring so it would pop out in time for him to run to the table with it as she arrived with the eggs.”

Eventually, Guarnaschelli became a chef and mastered the process herself: “I think I was 22 and cooking at my first restaurant job when my mom finally gave me the okay to scramble the eggs for family breakfast. Maybe that’s also where I learned the respect it takes to cook something so simple so well.”

The Iron Chef shared her techniques for easy scrambled eggs

In a Food Network instructional video (see the tweet above), Guarnaschelli demonstrated a few of her favorite ways to enjoy eggs. And chief among them is the humble, unassuming scrambled egg.

“Super simple,” the Chopped host begins. “I start just by cracking a few eggs. … You can either mix with a fork” or whisk it in a bowl “so that you get a homogenous-looking yellow mixture.”

Salt your eggs, the chef adds, “right before you scramble them … I like that salt and pepper to be really in the egg mix, not sprinkled on at the end.”

Another important and overlooked ingredient in the dish, she notes, is water: “A splash of water actually lightens and fluffs your scramble,” she says.

Her favorite pan for scrambled eggs is “a nonstick pan with a little bit of butter. Give the butter a minute. We want the pan a little bit hot, not too hot.”

Guarnaschelli’s scrambled eggs take just seconds to cook

Now that the set-up is in place, the whisked and seasoned eggs are poured into the hot pan. “I just run through the middle. … You can mix your eggs a lot, get it really broken up,” she continues. “Or you can kind of scramble in bigger strokes, so you get these bigger pieces of egg.”

Once the scramble has just started to set, which is after about 30 seconds, Guarnaschelli turns the heat off on the eggs: “That way, nice and easy, the residual heat from the pan, I can really dictate how cooked or not cooked I want these eggs to be. … There’s my little scramble.”