My roommate Priya left her nonstick pan behind when she moved out last spring. It's dented on one side from a drawer that never closed right, and it's still the pan I use for eggs. A recipe card taped inside a cupboard said medium heat, a cooking show I watched the same week swore by high heat and constant motion. I split the difference for months without ever checking which one was actually right.
Your first day
Starting takes about ten minutes. Crack two eggs into a bowl and whisk until uniform. Put about a teaspoon of butter in the pan before turning on the heat, since an empty nonstick pan overheats and damages its coating, and set it on low, low enough that the butter melts slowly instead of foaming right away, that's the actual test for whether the heat is low enough. Pour the eggs in and stir slowly and constantly with a rubber spatula or wooden spoon, never metal on a nonstick pan, scraping the bottom the whole time, listening for a gentle sizzle rather than an aggressive one.
Pull the pan off the heat while the eggs still look glossy and slightly wet. They'll keep cooking from the pan's residual heat for another few seconds. If you're serving anyone pregnant, elderly or unwell, cook them until no liquid egg remains.
Most people turn the heat up because low heat feels like it's taking forever. Don't. High heat turns eggs rubbery and grey in under a minute, and there's no fixing it once it happens.
The thing most people miss
My eggs came out differently every single time even though I was using the same pan, same eggs, same butter. The only real variable was how hot the burner was set, and neither the medium-heat recipe card nor the high-heat cooking show had it right for what I was actually trying to do. Heat was the thing worth learning first, well before any recipe.
Once I started cooking on genuinely low heat and paying attention to sound and smell instead of a dial setting, the eggs stopped being unpredictable.
A misconception worth correcting
Turning up the heat doesn't make eggs cook better, it just makes them cook unevenly. The outside sets and toughens long before the inside catches up, which is the rubbery texture most people blame on the eggs themselves rather than the burner.
What I actually learned had nothing to do with any specific recipe, it was noticing what the pan itself was telling me. Consistent knife work is the next place that same instinct pays off, since an even dice cooks evenly for the same reason low heat does.