I like scrambled eggs to be soft, with a billowy appearance reminiscent of cumulus clouds. So probably an on average 1 cm curd size. I usually use about 6-8 eggs, just a small bit of milk (at most 1-4 cup or so) and a relatively small amount of butter for coating the pot (use more and the result is greasy). I use a pot, not a pan or skillet, because the high sides of a pot help to trap moisture much better and mean that you're not basically frying the eggs. I use a spoon for stirring rather than a spatula because a spatula causes curds that are in sheets rather than roughly spherical lumps. I don't like "sheety" scrambled eggs - their texture is more slippery than it is porridgey (very very rough texture descriptors, to be sure). Scrambled eggs is one of the places where most emphatically I don't use non-stick because the surface tends to defeat the ability to get those billowy curds. You almost always end up with sheets.
Runniness I think is a matter of what that term actually means. For instance, there's one kind of runny that is the result of eggs that haven't set at all, where the amount of such unset eggs is enough to separate from the cooked curds and pool on the plate. What this is is warm beaten eggs with curds floating in it. Another type of runny happens if eggs are overcooked, or cooked too quickly. In that case the curds quickly dry out and squeeze their moisture into the pan, resulting in something with very dry, grainy curds (usually very small in size) with thin ooze seeping out. Yet a third type of runny is when you've added a lot of additional liquid, so that even when the eggs are cooked the mbutt is still pretty fluid. Depending on how this is done you have something like either a very thick pouring custard or a lumpy soup.
I'm not a fan of any of these types of runniness. What I like is when the mbutt is mostly solid curds, but with just enough fluid egg left to coat the curds completely, and where that fluid has the consistency of a soft custard. (You can't actually isolate enough fluid to test it separately - rather, from the overall mouthfeel you can identify the texture). Overall, then, it comes out with a consistency similar to risotto, but with a much larger lump size than a rice grain.
-- Alex Rast (remove d., .7, not, and .NOSPAM to reply)
