Scientists say they have deciphered the code to boil the perfect egg.
It is a recipe that you can try for yourself, although the moment is not ideal with the high prices of eggs in the United States of an avian flu outbreak.
The perfect boiled egg has a velvety yolk matched with a soft and solid white.
Achieving this balance can be a challenge because the yolk is cooked at a temperature lower than the white one. Boil hard, an egg can produce a calcareous yolk, while cooking low and slow can produce little cooked white in the form of jelly.
This image provided by the researchers in February 2025 shows the results of different methods of boiling eggs, with a new technique called “periodic cooking” on the right.
Emilia di Lorenzo, Ernesto Di Maio through AP
The researchers cooked hundreds of eggs and used mathematics to face this coined. An equation dealt with how heat travels between a hot surface and an egg; Another captured how the egg content was transformed from liquid to solid with a gel state in the middle.
Its final recipe involves transferring eggs into a steam basket every two minutes between two bowls of water: one boiling and the other warm at 86 degrees Fahrenheit (30 degrees Celsius), for a total of 32 minutes before cooling with running water and fights .
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“You could definitely do this at home with half a dozen eggs more or less,” said Gregory Weiss, a chemist at the University of California, Irvine, who did not participate in the investigation.
In the method proposed by the researchers, the periodic cooking called, the egg whites are heated and cool until they are completely established. The yolk, on the other hand, remained firm at a constant temperature and cooked until they are creamy.
“You can almost spread it, as in bread,” said study author Emilia Di Lorenzo of the University of Naples Federico II.
To confirm that they had cooked something new, the researchers tested the chemical composition of the prepared eggs and served them to an eight panel along with traditional boiled eggs.
The research was published Thursday in the journal Communications Engineering.
This new technique could mean more time in the kitchen compared to a standard hard egg, said Food Scientist Joanne Slavin at the University of Minnesota. But the combination of textures in the language could be worth it.
“This is a slower process to get a better result,” said Slavin, who had no role in the study.
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& Copy 2025 the Canadian press