Fry Your Eggs In This Flavor-Packed Oil For The Best Breakfast

There are about a billion ways you can make a single egg before you even wade into the wide world of tasty upgrades. Poached, coddled, baked, and hard-boiled; opportunities abound. There are even methods within the methods, like all of the secrets for making the best scrambled eggs. Let's say, however, that you've settled on fried — a classic egg preparation that carries plenty of its own tips. You can imbue it with a lot of flavor with almost no additional effort at all, simply by cooking your egg in the right kind of fat. And no, we aren't even talking about ways to reuse your bacon grease, for once.

Frying your egg in chili oil will give it the zippy pep that you might otherwise introduce after the fact via hot sauce and seasonings. Your mileage will vary based on how potent your chili oil is to begin with, which is affected by its age and how it's stored, but it should give you a good head start toward the heat you seek. If you don't have the condiment, you can give chili oil fried eggs a try by simply spooning a bit of the spicy oil from the top of the chili crisp that you might already have in your refrigerator. You can also probably pick up a bottle at your local grocery store for pretty cheap. And, of course, you can always make it yourself to best calibrate chili oil to your own taste.

Chili peppers are one of the best infusions for olive oil, but you needn't break out the good stuff on your first batch. A typically cheaper neutral oil like canola will work just great, too, and it will probably effect a more clear chili flavor absent the otherwise welcome olive notes. The canola might turn out to be more versatile, too, due to its higher smoke point and thus the wider range of recipes you can use it for.

Once you've settled on a cup of your preferred base, you'll also want to pick a pack of peppers. Crushed red pepper flakes work terrifically in this case, and you might even already have a jar in your pantry. Just be sure to taste a few flakes first for freshness if it's been a while since you last used it. You'll transfer a few tablespoons of the flakes into a bowl, heat the oil to 350 degrees Fahrenheit, join the two ingredients and stir, let cool, and strain into an airtight container. It'll keep you swimming in chili oil fried eggs for a few months, if you don't use it all up for other things first.