(upbeat music) - Hi, I'm Chef Jacques Pépin, and this is, "American Masters At Home".

There is no thing as simple and as good as just a fried egg.

There is a way of doing it, I mean my way of doing it not everyone way but mine.

So, a tablespoon of butter in there, two eggs, always break the egg on something flat like this up to open your egg.

Otherwise when you do it on something pointed like this, it push the shell inside often break the yolk and introduce bacteria, So something flat this way.

Okay.

So, the idea here is to do it at relatively low temperature, which is not exactly what you do in a Cafeteria, because cooking it at low temperature will give you an eggs with very tender Egg white and that was the idea, when I was kid you were taught how to do it so it was very tender, the white no crustiness around, and cooking slowly this way.

So it's very tender.

So just melt the butter, and a couple of eggs will go in there, a dash of salt on top of it, rest of the seasoning will come later.

And here, now I'm going to reduce the heat to very low and I wanna cover it, I wanna glaze the top of the egg, What we call oeuf mirroire, a mirror you know, is just on top.

sometimes to help a little bit on that what I do, I put like a teaspoon of water around.

No it's not, but that with the lid on tip, that create a steam , a little bit of steam and it will glaze the top and that will take about two minute.

It's about ready Of course, I like my eggs runny in the center.

Of course you can leave them longer if you don't want to have them ready.

But as you can see here, the whole top is glazed and it cooked very gently, this way, and that will go into my plate.

this way I like to put cracked pepper on top here.

Again a portion of this, maybe.

A few shy of too And here is the way I like my eggs.

So you can see here, that that thing is still very runny.

This is thick, but that egg white here is going to be very, very tender.

And the center here, will be this way.

Just the way I like it.

It's my way of doing it, try that way, happy cooking.