Rescues · TO FOLD
Scrambled eggs turned rubbery and dry.
Why it happens
Too much heat for too long. Egg proteins set softly just below 70°C; past that they keep tightening and wring their own moisture out, which is why overcooked eggs are tough and weeping at the same time. Low heat, gentle folding rather than constant stirring, and pulling the pan while the eggs still look slightly underdone — they finish cooking on the plate.
Recovering it
A deflated mixture cannot be re-aerated — whipping it now would develop the batter rather than rebuild the foam. Underfolded is simply finished with a few more strokes. The reliable prevention is to have the oven at temperature and the tin prepared before the folding starts, because a folded batter loses volume every minute it waits.
The mechanism
Whipped egg white or cream is a foam — air cells held in a thin protein or fat film. That film is fragile, and stirring shears it, collapsing bubbles and releasing the air that was going to be the structure of the finished thing. Folding replaces the shearing motion with a lifting one: the spatula cuts down through the centre, sweeps along the bottom, and turns the heavy mixture up over the light one, so the two interleave rather than grind against each other. The density difference is the other half of the problem — a stiff base and a light foam do not combine easily, so the first third of the foam is sacrificed, stirred in properly to slacken the base, and only then is the rest folded. That sacrificial third saves more air than gentleness alone ever could.
The full TO FOLD lesson — how to tell, where to practise it, what it carries to.