A perfectly cooked egg, depending on the sciences of materials

How do you cook a perfect egg? Scientists understood this

By Arminda Downey-Mavromatis edited by Andrea Thompson

Hardly boiling, wrapping or using a fashionable sub -video – regardless of the approach, cooking a whole egg keeps the texture of yellow or white but rarely both. Now scientists think they have cracked the perfectly cooked egg.

To trigger the optimal denaturation, or protein breakdown In an egg, while keeping the key nutrients intact, the ideal temperature for cooking an egg yolk is around 65 degrees Celsius (149 degrees fahrenheit). For egg white, or albumin, it’s about 85 degrees C (185 degrees F). Hard savagement ensures that albumin is completely cooked, but it can give a more chalky yellow. Flexible bouile eggs have a smoother yellow, but they can be too liquid for the taste of some people. A vacuum egg – cooked in water of 60 to 70 degrees (140 to 158 degrees -F) for at least an hour – is close to the ideal. The resulting egg is creamy throughout, but albumin is only partially defined. The device is not a common kitchen feature either.

The doctorate student in materials of materials Emilia di Lorenzo and Professor Ernesto Di Maio, both at the University of Naples Federico II in Italy, generally work on polymers manufacturing methods with different densities. But for their latest study, they looked for a new method to prepare an egg that would allow yellow and egg white to cook optimally without separating them. “What we did in the case of eggs was to adopt this approach and try to obtain a layer of texture instead of a layer of densities,” explains Di Lorenzo. Inspiration was an egg dish that cost € 80 (just over $ 80) in which the components were perfectly cooked but separately.

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Di Lorenzo and Di Maio have theorized that the alternation of the raw egg (always in its shell) between hot water and lukewarm water several times on short periods would allow yellow and albumin to reach their perfect shape. They used mathematical modeling and computer simulations to establish their alternative temperatures – 100 degrees C (212 degrees F) and 30 degrees C (86 degrees F) – and time – 32 minutes in total, changing every two minutes. Then it was time to cook a lot eggs to test the methods.

The team examined their results with an infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR) of Fourier Transform, which uses infrared waves to probe the chemical structure, in order to discover how the degradation of proteins in egg yolk and white had affected The texture of hard-wrapped hard-wrapped eggs wrapped in eggs and white, soft-bouile or cooked via vacuum or the new method.

Of course, when you make eggs, you probably do not classify your preparation options according to the degree of protein denaturation, so that researchers have also surveyed the texture and taste of eggs with more qualitative approaches. The analysis of the texture profile, which implies compressing egg pieces, determined that albumin and the yellow of the hard egg were more difficult and more soft than the other options, but that the rest of the preparations n ‘was that subtly different. Differences in more subjective taste have been evaluated by a panel of sensory experts.

The team has experienced dozens and dozens of eggs. There were “160 alone for sensory analysis – cooked by Ernesto di Maio” in his kitchen, known as Di Lorenzo.

Researchers have found that if you are looking to maximize your morning nutrition, their recently proposed “periodic” cooked eggs may be the way to follow. Periodic eggs have better preserved the nutrients of the egg than other preparations. “The most remarkable result was the preservation of polyphenols, but many amino acids are also preserved,” explains Di Lorenzo. Amino acids are useful to build proteins in our body, and Polyphenols are antioxidants which are promising as anti-inflammatory compounds.

The project has always changed the egg routines from Di Maio. Although he recognizes that the preparation takes a little more time, it will be a periodic cuisine in the future. Di Lorenzo, however, may not change his diet.

“We were really already deep in this egg project,” says Di Maio, when “(di Lorenzo) told me that she did not like eggs – to all”. Di Lorenzo looks more slowly. “Perhaps”, she offers, “it was a quest to try and like eggs.”