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Perfect eggs, anything can happen, Creative Australia

★★★★★ Scientifically Perfect Eggs

First up this week: WE F%$ING LOVE SCIENCE! Breakfast eaters have long faced the challenge of boiling an egg that is neither underdone and gooey nor overdone and chalky but tender and evenly cooked throughout. Competing theories as to how to achieve this abound. We've tried a wide range of techniques—including spinning the egg 12 times anti-clockwise before dropping it in the water—but the results have been inconsistent at best. According to Emilia Di Lorenzo et al, material scientists from the University of Naples, this is because boiling the perfect egg is actually physically nigh on impossible. The problem arises due to the fact that the yolk and the white (or in scientific language, the albumen) are different proteins and therefore have different ideal cooking temperatures. The yolk wants to bathe in water at 65 degrees, whereas the white prefers a steamy 85. This means that if you cook the egg at the yolk’s ideal temp, the white remains runny, but if you simmer at the white’s Goldilocks Zone, the yolk gets too hard. Call it the Poacher’s Paradox. Fortunately, the Italian scientists spent years in a lab experimenting on eggs and came up with a novel method that they recently published in an imprint of the prestigious journal, Nature. It involves cooking the egg alternately between boiling water (100c) and tepid water (30c) for 32 minutes, switching between the two saucepans every two minutes (that’s 16 transfers in total). Why this works we have no idea. (In the paper, they say it is because of “periodic boundary conditions in the energy transport problem.”) The resulting eggs were put through a gamut of tests: their chemical structure was probed with infrared rays; they were subjected to texture profile analysis; a panel of Neapolitan sensory experts were brought in for a tasting. Across the board, the Di Lorenzo et al eggs blew the competition away. We have neither the kitchen equipment nor the culinary wherewithal to try this involved method for ourselves but in a city whose primary export is neurotically prepared breakfast food, this could be huge.

★★★★ anything can happen by Susan Hampton