We were in the test kitchen, making scrambled eggs without oil or butter in stainless-steel skillets over high heat. The eggs stuck to the pans and made terrible messes. The test cooks working around us kept shaking their heads, no doubt wondering why we hadn’t switched to nonstick pans or tossed pats of butter into the skillets. We just smiled and ignored them.
We wanted those eggs to stick to the pans. We’d just started working on a review of kitchen sponges and needed to use them for some challenging cleaning tasks. As anyone who’s ever goofed up their scrambled eggs knows, getting these skillets clean would be tough.