The Perfect Egg

The "perfect" boiled egg (Di Maio/WSJ)

Your humble blogger will go through some time and effort to acquire good food, but I don't love boiled eggs enough to spend over half an hour preparing them:

A group of Italian scientists has cracked the secret of how to boil a perfect egg.

The catch? It takes 32 minutes, two containers of water held at different temperatures, and a fastidious chef moving the egg between the containers every two minutes...

The scientists aimed to cook an egg evenly throughout. The conundrum was that an egg’s layers—its yellow yolk and white albumen—cook at different temperatures. Eaters risk a chalky yolk if they want a fully cooked white, or a runny white if they want a creamy yolk.

Transfer eggs between pots every 2 minutes

To achieve perfection, [Prof. of materials engineering Ernesto] Di Maio’s group, aided by mathematical models, simulations and experiments, invented “periodic cooking,” a method that calls for starting an egg in a pan of boiling water, leaving it there for two minutes, transferring it to a bowl of tepid water at 86 degrees Fahrenheit for another two minutes, and repeating the cycle eight times.

That’s 16 steps.

The goal is to keep the yolk at a consistent temperature of around 149 degrees Fahrenheit while still cooking the white, which usually needs to reach 185 degrees Fahrenheit to cook.

This is the ideal task for our first AI robot. It will never lose count of how many transfers it made and will make each transfer at the two-minute mark. It will do the job I won't do and do it better than I could ever have done it