The pursuit of the perfect boiled egg

In a quest for perfection, people can fall down some interesting rabbit holes. They will go to lengths that makes the average person scratch their head in puzzlement. This is true of nearly any human endeavor, and perhaps especially so for cooking. There are bakers who weigh the most minute quantities of ingredients in tenths of a gram, espresso connoisseurs who use stopwatches to time their shots, and researchers who will spend months to develop a process of ‘periodic cooking’ that results in the perfect boiled egg.

With the price of eggs at an all-time high, finding the perfect way to cook an egg doesn’t seem so crazy, although these scientists were not motivated by financial considerations. Instead, they were focused on the physical differences between the yolk and white that make it difficult to get a fully set white while retaining a creamy yolk in a boiled egg. The albumens in the white will not set until they reach temperatures that are much higher than that for a perfectly cooked yolk, as anyone who has ever made a hard-boiled egg understands. Cooks have tried various methods to resolve this, but until now there was no way of cooking the eggs in their shells to consistently achieve this outcome.

The researchers concluded that to avoid overcooking the yolk, it was essential to cook the eggs in stages. They did this by placing “the raw shell-on egg alternatively in hot water (T_h) and cold water (T_c) for relatively short periods of time” and repeating this cycle until the yolk and white were both cooked to their individual ideal temperature. By using this method, they were able to get the whites to the higher temperatures needed to fully set the albumen without allowing the yolk to go above 67 degrees Fahrenheit, which they felt was the optimal yolk temperature.

I find this experiment fascinating, but I don’t know if I will use it in my cooking. There’s perfect, and then there is pretty good, and the difference in effort seems significant. This is a lot of fuss to make a boiled egg – although I am not in a position to judge, as I do tedious things that others might roll their eyes over, such as removing the chalazae from yolks when making a custard. If someone want to achieve the ‘perfect’ egg by using this method, they should go for it! And if you try it, please report back on what you think of the periodic cooking approach.