Boiled eggs are a fairly popular food, perhaps not everyone's favorite, but they are low-calorie high-protein natural food, a trifecta for most people, but is it possible that we have been making them the wrong way all these years? The answer depends on how you like your egg, but a growing number of people swear by a new method of cooking eggs.
We have always used boiling water to heat the eggs, and why not? Its simple, effective and easy. It cooks the egg, killing any dangerous bacteria and putting the egg in a edible form, and honestly is perfectly fine. If you are totally happy with the way you cook eggs you can stop reading, but if you'd like to see chemistry show you a new and interesting way to eat an egg, stay with me.
The problem with boiling eggs is just that, boiling. When we boil eggs we use water at 100°C, and that lack of temperature control is the problem. 100°C is overkill, and causes the egg white to totally congeal, giving it a rubbery and firm texture. Salmonella can be killed at much lower temperatures, roughly 74°C [1] depending on cook time. This means that eggs can be safely prepared at much lower temperatures, and this is the key to preparing these new eggs. The great part about cooking eggs at lower temperatures is that the proteins of the yolk and white start to congeal at roughly the same temperature (65-70°C 62-65°C respectively)[2], and because they consist of several different proteins that coagulate at different temperatures, depending on their chemical structure. Some of these proteins, including the principle protein of egg whites, don't even start to coagulate until 80°C[3]. This means that you can safely cook eggs at a much lower temperature, which gives a interesting array of options of varying textures for both egg white and yolk, depending on the exact temperature you cook at.
1. http://www.fsis.usda.gov/Fact_Sheets/Salmonella_Questions_&_Answers/index.asp#9
2. http://newton.ex.ac.uk/teaching/CDHW/egg/
3. http://www.fooducation.org/2006/05/opposite-boiled-eggs-cooking-egg-with.html
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1 comment:
This is really interesting because I have a boiled egg almost every morning. So I'm assuming you still use water just at a lower temperature, but how can you tell the water is hot enough?
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