It's surprising how difficult it is to make a perfect fried egg, one with the white closely surrounding a perfect soft yolk:

• The eggs you get in the shops are seldom completely fresh, and they spread all over the place.
• It's relatively easy for the yolks to break, even when cracking the eggs.
• Keeping the right frying temperature is difficult, and either the whites bubble (which they do better when the eggs are older) or the yolk gets hard before the white is done. In extreme cases, the whites can brown:

  

• Getting the egg out of the pan is a problem: the eggs tend to stick to the egg slice, and even when it's oiled, there's a serious danger of tearing the yolk open

So today I tried an alternative: steam them. I used small Chinese saucers, buttered so that the eggs wouldn't stick:

The steaming took a surprising amount of time to cook the whites, about 6 minutes. By that time, the yolks were done too:

In addition, the anti-stick measures didn't work:

So that's another unsuccessful experiment. Is it worth continuing? To be considered. The real question is why the yolks cooked so much faster than the whites in comparison with frying. It must be related to the thickness. More consideration needed.