This Kitchen Tool Has Completely Changed My Breakfast Routine

Despite what my babyish, uncultured teen self would say, eggs are my favorite food. (No offense, past Kev. Pizza’s still great.) I love eggs. They’re versatile, easy to cook, and great at just about any time of day. Give them to me scrambled, yolk-deep in shakshuka or hard boiled, it doesn’t matter — I’ll enjoy them all the same. But when it comes to preparing my favorite egg dish, tamagoyaki, that’s when eggs get serious for me. That’s when I pull out my special pan.

Tamagoyaki is a velvety soft Japanese rolled omelet made up of thin layers of eggs. It looks kinda like a fluffy yellow pillow or a burrito wrapped in egg. I found out about the dish during the first half of quarantine, after spending weeks of growing tired of the same old combination of scrambled eggs and cheese in the morning, and binging YouTube street food videos from Japan. I came across tamagoyaki and thought, Wow, that dish looks so gorgeous and fluffy, how can I make it at home? It turns out all you need is a tamagoyaki-specific pan. After a search on Amazon, I found one that put my tamagoyaki escapades on easy mode.

This tamagoyaki pan has been helping me serve velvety rolled eggs since the beginning of the pandemic, and two years later, it’s still going strong. To cook tamagoyaki, you need to cook small amounts of eggs and shape them into a rectangle. But, unlike those chefs I saw on YouTube, I’m not the best at shaping foods, and I’m awful at cooking with chopsticks. 

This pan has a small incline to help you roll each egg layer up, a solid non-stick coating, and equally as important: It’s so compact that it’s non-invasive in my kitchen space. It stands at about an inch high, five inches wide, and seven inches long, and its stainless steel magnetic bottom means you can store it on any strip you’ve got on your kitchen walls. It also weighs next to nothing. But don’t let its size fool you — this pan can make a thick tamagoyaki with up to five eggs. 

You also better believe I’ve got a silicone spatula to match. The spatula is bright green, which satisfyingly matches my pan, and is slightly smaller than the width of the pan, making it handy for rolling those eggs. It’s also useful elsewhere, due to its wide shovel. I use it with my electric griddle when I’m making pancakes, or flip burgers when I’m in the mood. But as a tamagoyaki roller, it’s so simple. And it beats having to learn how to roll up this omelet with chopsticks.

The best part of making tamagoyaki in the morning is mastering the roll, or flip, and trying different combinations as you would a traditional omelet. The other part is showing it off to your friends. Sometimes I’ll pack up a tamagoyaki omelet to go, slicing it up and tossing it in my lunch box, other times I’ll take my time making one for snapping beautiful Instagram pics.

In any case, this pan has completely changed my breakfast routine. No longer am I bored of the same old egg scramble with a hint of cheese in my mornings. Tamagoyaki is fluffy, fun to make, and savory (with dashi and chives) or sweet (a dash of mirin) when I want it to be. And I won’t ever stop making it.

This post originally appeared on Apartment Therapy. See it there: This Petite $17 Egg Pan Helped Me Fall in Love with Making Breakfast in an Entirely New Way