I've Made Ten Thousand Fried Eggs and Didn't Know What I Was Doing

Sunny-side-up eggs. I've made them probably ten thousand times. Crack, pan, heat, done. And then one day I realized I had no idea what was actually happening. I didn't know what temperature the whites set at versus the yolks. I didn't know why sometimes the edges lace up crispy and sometimes they don't. I'd never once thought about the science behind something I do on autopilot every single morning.

It's not like the information doesn't exist. Harold McGee wrote it down decades ago. But there's a gap between reading about protein denaturation and actually applying it at the stove, half-awake, before coffee. So one day I asked Claude to deep-dive the physics and chemistry of frying an egg, then talk me through the whole cook step by step. The eggs were great — best I'd made in years. But what stuck wasn't the eggs. It was having something I could ask stupid questions to in real time.

Here's what I mean. Recipes say "cook until golden." I've cooked a lot of onions. White, translucent, pinkish, various shades of brown. Never golden. I have never once looked at onions in a pan and thought "yes, that's gold." You can't ask a cookbook "which shade of brown do you actually mean?" while your hands are covered in chicken juice. But I could show Claude a photo of my onions mid-cook, and it could actually tell me — "those are past translucent but not yet at the Maillard stage you want, give them another two minutes."

That experience became Pan Out — a set of open-source AI skills for Claude Code (Anthropic's CLI tool) that handle the full arc of cooking: research the science, build a step-by-step protocol, guide you through the cook with voice and timers, then debrief afterward so next time starts better.

Protocols and Science Files

The core idea is a separation between two kinds of documents. Protocols are the adaptive layer — they contain phases, timing, temperatures, sensory cues, and ingredient scaling, all tuned to your specific kitchen and equipment. Science files are the constraint layer — chemistry, food safety, technique physics.

Take beef stew. The protocol knows your Dutch oven runs hot, that you prefer a deeper sear, that last time you braised for 2.5 hours and the chuck was perfect. It has phases: sear the meat, build the fond, deglaze, braise. Each phase has specific instructions, sensory checkpoints ("fond should be mahogany, not black"), and timing ranges.

The science file for beef stew knows that collagen in chuck converts to gelatin between 71–82°C over time, that the Maillard reaction needs surface temperatures above 140°C and dry meat, that acidic ingredients like wine or tomatoes accelerate collagen breakdown. It doesn't care about your Dutch oven or your preferences. It's just the physics.

The protocol can flex freely. Tell it you're out of avocado for a different dish and it'll rework around potatoes — different prep, different timing, different technique. But when it wants to change a temperature or a food safety parameter, it checks the science file first. The science file is a guardrail against hallucination.

What It's Like at the Stove

Cooking has two modes: active and passive. When you're searing meat, you need attention — one instruction at a time, responsive to what you're seeing and telling it. When something is braising for 90 minutes, you need to walk away and get called back.

Pan Out handles both. Active phases give you one step, wait for you to confirm or ask questions, then give you the next. Voice output is capped at two sentences — anything longer and you can't hear it over the exhaust fan. Passive phases set a background timer and leave you alone. When the timer's up, it calls you back.

The part I didn't expect to matter so much is the mid-cook conversation. "This fond looks really dark, is that okay?" "The onions smell sweet but look pale, should I wait?" You can talk through problems as they happen. You can send it photos. It adapts based on what actually happened, not what was supposed to happen.

The Debrief Loop

After each cook, there's a debrief. What went well, what didn't, what surprised you. It feeds back into the protocol — if you braised for 2.5 hours and it was better than the 2 hours the protocol originally said, the protocol updates. Lessons also accumulate across dishes. What you learn about fond making beef stew is available when you're making pan sauce for chicken.

Pan Out is open source. The docs are here and the code is on GitHub. It runs as a skills plugin for Claude Code — no build step, no package manager, just Markdown files that teach Claude how to cook with you.