The Water in the Pan Is Where the Recipe Falls Apart: What Gwyneth Paltrow Got Wrong With Spanish Eggs

Gwyneth Paltrow posted a video cooking a Spanish dish and called it her version of broken eggs with potatoes. The comments under the post split exactly the way they split here whenever an outsider takes on one of our dishes.

Her method goes like this: oil, shallot, a little paprika, black pepper and salt are mixed with water, then poured over potatoes sliced into rounds in the pan. It is covered, left to soften, then onion and garlic go in. The sausages are fried separately. At the end the eggs are cracked over the potatoes, covered again, and left until the yolk stays soft.

The water is where the recipe parts ways with the original. Classic huevos rotos, the kind the Madrid restaurant Casa Lucio makes, are potatoes fried in plenty of oil and a fried egg broken at the table. The yolk is the sauce - there is no other sauce. With water, the potato steams instead of frying, and precisely the crispness you are after disappears.

Paltrow has a genuine connection to Spain - she lived in Talavera de la Reina as a teenager and learned Spanish. That is not a tourist story. But knowing the language does not settle the question of technique, and here technique is almost the entire dish.

What is worth taking from the video is something else: potato and egg with a little seasoned fat is a fifteen-minute dinner, and that is as true of every Balkan kitchen as it is of the Spanish one. Our version has a different name and no Rioja sausage, but the logic is identical.

If you want to do it properly: fry the potato in enough oil, no water and no lid at the start, take it out when the edges darken, and only then put the egg on top. Onion and garlic are recommended but are not part of the original - and there the famous cook is more right than she gets credit for.