If Your Pan Is Dirty, Fry Eggs In This Small Kitchen Tool Instead

Frying pans are mission-critical cookware. The best nonstick skillets and frying pans are the workhorses of any kitchen, especially if you like to make grilled cheese sandwiches on repeat for lunch and fried chicken for dinner in the evening. This can lead to quite the conundrum in the morning if you want to fry an egg and all of your frying pans are dirty, but it doesn't have to be problematic. Just use a metal ladle. Per a TikTok video posted by Andrew Zimmern, if you have an egg spoon, which looks a lot like a ladle, you can use it on the stove as a makeshift frying pan to fry an egg.

The professional chef demonstrated how to do so by holding his giant "egg spoon" made of copper directly over a gas stovetop to warm the makeshift frying pan up before adding some butter. After the butter melted, Zimmern cracked his egg into the ladle and let it fry. If you use this trick, it is important that you hold the handle — preferably while wearing an oven mitten — over the burner until your egg is completely fried.

How did the egg turn out? The proof is in the pudding, and Andrew Zimmern wrote on his social media post, "I just had to try this viral way of frying an egg, and it did not disappoint. For sure going to be a #familyfavorite from now on!"  This chef-approved strategy for perfect fried eggs is worth trying out. But Zimmern isn't the only chef to use this technique. Alice Waters, who was once an advocate for the farm-to-table movement, used her colonial-looking egg spoon during a segment of "60 Minutes" where she demonstrated how to fry an egg over a wood fire. It's definitely a cooking method that will wow guests. 

However, before you get cracking, pay attention to the size and shape of your ladle. Just as a frying pan's size can determine if your eggs spread too much, these spoons that look like they have a small bowl attached to the handle come in many shapes and sizes, which can also influence the final shape of your egg. If the cup of the ladle is wide and shallow, the egg will have more room to spread out and your yolk could spread. If it's more like a scoop, it will keep your egg more compact.