Woman Sparks Outrage With Bizarre Egg Frying Technique She Apparently Learnt From Her Italian Grandmother

A woman has gone viral on social media for a creative yet controversial egg recipe that uses cucumber instead of oil.

Jana, who goes by username Jana.dvll on TikTok, can be seen lathering her skillet with a large green fruit before cracking an egg into it.

The result? A perfectly cooked sunny-side-up egg, its golden orb intact, sliding out of the pan with ease, and leaving it even cleaner than it would have been had she used oil or butter.

Jana, who appeared as astonished as some of her viewers, proclaimed that she would never use oil again.

TikTok, for the most part, is skeptical, with many attributing the success of the recipe with two million engagements to the pan’s nonstick coating.

“I don’t know how everybody is surprised that the egg isn’t stuck on a nonstick pan. [It] literally has nothing to do with the cucumber,” one commenter wrote.

To test the theory, Sara Kate Gillingham and Maxwell Ryan’s TheKitchn performed an experiment of its own.

The home cooking media outlet cracked an egg into a cold nonstick skillet and turned the heat up slowly.

The result proved effective. There was no browning at the edges with the additional upside of not having hot grease splatter out of the pan.

But it did present one drawback. The egg was “noticeably less rich and delicious” than when cooked with oil, fat or butter.

Jana claimed she learned the hack from her Italian grandmother.

TikTok had ideas on this too, with one commenter writing: “As an Italian, absolutely not. No Italian grandma would replace oil.”

Olive oil—in the context of Italian cooking—is nothing to worry about, argued one of Jana’s followers, who sees the obsession with skipping it as misplaced.

With the exceptions of canola, corn, soybean, sunflower, safflower, and palm oils that produce unhealthy compounds when heated, cooking with oils can be healthy—especially when inflammation is a common condition, per the University of California, Davis.

Cooking with Teflon-coated cookware, however, is a source of controversy in medical and scientific circles.

Teflon, now a trademarked brand name, was known to contain a toxic chemical called perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), but the substance was phased out by 2013, according to the health guidance website, Healthline.

It was associated with thyroid disorders, chronic kidney and liver disease, and testicular cancer, along with infertility and low birth rates, according to various studies archived by the National Library of Medicine.

The coating still contains per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAs), chemicals known for their oil- and water-resistant properties.

The effects of these synthetic compounds on the human body—which are also found in rain jackets, nail polish, dental floss and carpets—are not fully understood, says the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).