Preparing our breakfast may never be the same after team of a Italian scientists say they have worked out the optimum method of boiling an egg.

A newly-developed method called periodic cooking apparently offers a way to perfectly cook both the yolk and white of a boiled egg.

The bad news is a hard-boiled egg will now ideally take 32 minutes to cook to perfection, rather that the previously accepted 10 to 12 minutes.

In a study published this week in Communications Engineering, a team of scientists from the Italian National Research Council’s Institute for Polymers, Composites, and Biomaterials claim their method produces an evenly cooked egg with a better nutritional profile.

Cooking an egg evenly is a challenge because the yolk and white solidify at different temperatures — the white (albumen) sets at 85 degrees, while the yolk sets at 65 degrees.

Traditional boiling at 100 degrees fully sets the yolk but can apparently can overcook the white.

Another method, sous vide cooking at 60-70 degrees for an hour, leaves the white undercooked.

A comparison of the stages and methods of cooking eggs. Photo: Pellegrino Musto and Ernesto Di Maio

Game-changing technique

To solve this, the researchers used computational fluid dynamics simulations to design an improved cooking process.

Researchers cooked hundreds of eggs and used maths to tackle this runny conundrum.

One equation dealt with how heat travels between a hot surface and an egg; another captured how the egg’s contents morph from liquid to solid with a gel-like state in between.

Their final method involves repeatedly moving an egg between boiling water (100 degrees) and cooler water (30 degrees) every two minutes for a total of 32 minutes.

This process, dubbed periodic cooking, was tested in real-life experiments alongside traditional hard-boiled, soft-boiled, and sous vide eggs.

The results were analysed for texture, taste, and chemical composition using advanced techniques such as Nuclear Magnetic Resonance and High-Resolution Mass Spectrometry.

The results

Periodically-cooked eggs had a soft yolk similar to that of a sous vide egg, while the consistency of the white was somewhere between that of sous vide and soft-boiled.

Temperatures in the periodically-cooked egg white ranged between 35 and 100 degrees during cooking, while the yolk remained at a consistent temperature of 67 degrees.

To confirm they had cooked up something new, the researchers tested the chemical makeup of the prepared eggs and served them to a panel of eight tasters alongside traditional boiled eggs.

Chemical analysis suggested that the periodically-cooked egg yolks also contained more polyphenols — micronutrients which have been explored for their health benefits.

While the new technique could mean more time in the kitchen compared to a standard hard-boiled egg, food scientist Joanne Slavin from the University of Minnesota said the blend of textures on the tongue could be worth the extra time.

“This is a slower process to get a better outcome,” said Slavin, who had no role in the study.

-with agencies