The Current - The secret to the perfect boiled egg? 32 minutes

Episode Date: February 24, 2025

Italian scientist Ernesto Di Maio says he’s cracked the perfect way to boil an egg, every time — but it might take a little longer than you think. 

Larry Driscoll confessed to a murder that he swears he did not commit. And yet in 2015, Driscoll found himself in a police station describing the crime. And there was a confrontation in the vehicle. I think she was trying to take my billfold and I went to defend myself to try to push her out of the car. I'm Kathleen Goltar and this week on Crime Story, the interrogation that sent an innocent man to prison. Find Crime Story wherever you get your podcasts.

This is a CBC podcast. Hello, it's Matt here. Thanks for listening to The Current, wherever you're getting this podcast. Before we get to today's show, wonder if I might ask a favor of you if you could hit the follow button on whatever app you're using There is a lot of news that's out there these days We're trying to help you make sense of it all and give you a bit of a break from some of that news, too So if you already follow the program, thank you

And if you have done that maybe you could leave us a rating or review as well The whole point of this is to let more listeners find our show and perhaps find some of that information That's so important in these really tricky times. So thanks for all of that. Appreciate it and on to today's show One two, three four five pots all boiling away And I'm all steamed up too because we're doing HB eggs today on the French chef eggs today on the French Chef. For decades chefs like Julia Child have been trying to help us perfect what seems on the surface like a pretty easy assignment, boil an egg. If it was so easy though why would we need all this help?

Hi guys, hope you're well. Okay today we're going to do something very challenging. We are going to learn, I'm going to teach you how to boil an egg. Yes, you heard it right. I want to show you how to make properly hard-cooked eggs and off-mole, that is a softer one. The first thing that you do in the wrong part of the egg, you make a little hole. Turn it on high, we're going to bring it up to a boil. I'm just putting a splash of white vinegar in my water. I put the eggs in once it comes up to a boil. I do six minutes, okay? Scientists in Italy say they now have figured out how to get to the perfect egg.

It's going to take you longer than six minutes, but they say it's a perfect boiled egg every single time. Ernesto Di Maio is a materials scientist at the University of Naples Federico II. Ernesto Di Maio. Hello. Hello Thanks for the nice introduction. Thank you for being here. How do you define what a perfect boiled egg is? Well, this is according to science The literature says that you should boil the egg in such a way that the yolk is cooked at 65 degrees centigrade

and the albumen at 85. So to get there, this requires a process and you had to do scientific investigation to figure out what the perfect process is. Where did the idea for this come from? I mean, in all the things that you could study that you wanted to figure out why and how we go about creating a perfect boiled egg? Yeah, to do so, to cook the albumen and yolk at two different temperatures, you either

separate the two or you have to be inventive. You have to do something with your brain. So we did same things with materials and I do work with plastic foams. We did some research in the recent past to produce graded foams which means they are not the same at the different parts of the object. So we induce different layers in our materials just by treating them in non-conventional way and this is where periodic comes from. Treating materials to induce layers

without changing materials. And this calls for recyclability for the use of less different materials to have a more recyclable product. Are you somebody who eats a lot of eggs? Is that where this came from? Had you been thinking, you know what, I could make a better boiled egg than the one that I'm eating now?

Not in fact. A friend of mine suggested me to deal with the eggs and try my procedure with eggs. So it didn't come out from me. It came out from a talk, a chat with a friend of mine, which is genius. But there are people as well. I mean, there's this chef in Italy who charges almost like $75 Canadian for an egg. People take this very seriously. Yeah, true, true. But what he does to cook the two ingredients at their respective optimal temperature,

he separates the two, but that's easier. The challenge is to cook the two parts at two different temperatures without cracking the shell open. So you call your method the periodic egg. Explain to me how you go about creating this egg. How does it work? Okay, you have to take the egg out of the fridge

or at room temperature, doesn't matter a lot, and you simply put it in boiling water. The shell immediately when you put it in the boiling water, it gets to 100 and then the heat wave gets inside and the time to do this is about two minutes. So before the heat wave gets to the yolk, which will overcook the yolk, you have to put it at room temperature, 30 degrees centigrade water. And you have to do this forth and back eight times. So you take the egg out of that boiling water and then put it into a room temperature water, then put it back, then put it back in. True, yeah. So this is the price to pay in the long time is, yeah, a long time we know,

but this is the price to pay to have the perfect egg. The long time is 32 minutes, right? Right. So you have it in each temperature of water for how long? Two minutes for each bath, yeah. Two minutes, two minutes, two minutes, two minutes, up to 32. Right. Right.

But if you want it more cooked, you can be longer or shorter. So this method is actually stretchable a little bit to each one taste. So you can change a little bit the time, the number of periods, and also the temperature, the cold temperature. There are people who have cooked eggs in the sous vide,

which is like the warm water bath. It's a low temperature kind of water bath and that could take an hour, for example. Does that create the similar kind of perfect boiled egg just over a longer period of time? Yeah, that's the point. When you have sous vide, you have the perfect yolk, but you sacrifice the white, you have the perfect yolk, but you sacrifice

the white, the albumin, because you don't reach 85, which is the temperature required for denaturation of protein, etc. The perfect temperature for albumin is 85. This is always the case in cooking eggs. You have to sacrifice one of the faces because you have two different optimal temperatures. But your method suggests that you don't have to sacrifice anything, just time, that this will lead you to the perfect egg. Exactly. Is there consensus on what the perfect boiled egg is? There are some people who like their yolks

runnier than others. And I mean, they might say, what you see as perfection is not their idea of perfection. How do you define what perfect is? 4.30 To me, perfection comes from the literature, which calls for these two different temperatures. But of course, each of us is different. And as mentioned, you can stretch a little bit the meat or two, follow your taste. So you can, I mean, do it the way you like. I accept that and it's obvious, but I think if you have some time

that you want to devote to your family or friends, then it's worth trying. Are there shortcuts to this? I mean, one of the ways that I boil an egg is you boil it and then you put it in an ice bath and that cools it down. It doesn't take 32 minutes. It might take 10 minutes or something like that.

Yeah, right, right. No, our method cannot be short. Okay, it has to be 32 minutes or nothing. Yeah, true. Yeah, what people try, I have received thousands of emails regarding methods that are used by people. So yeah, ice bath or whatever. What we describe in the paper is the reason why you should do one of the methods that people have tried. So people do something by heart, by art, not

by science. So our approach tells people why they should do in a way or the other, I think. Of course, it's not for your everyday breakfast, but I think on special occasion, you may want to spend 32 minutes to provide a nice experience, I think, to your friends and relatives. Professor, now I wanna try this. I mean, I had to figure out the right opportunity and the right guests to serve the 32-minute egg too. As you say, it's not just for a Monday morning, perhaps,

unless your Monday is a luxurious one that stretches out in front of you. Thank you very much for this. My pleasure. Thank you very much for this. My pleasure. Thank you for the work you do. It's important to me that science goes on everyone's table. So thank you.

Ernesto Di Maio is a material scientist at the University of Naples, Federico II and one of the authors of a new research paper, looking at the perfect way to boil an egg. Would you take more than half an hour to boil your egg? Have you, recipes and techniques are passed down through generations, right?

So maybe you learned something from a family member that will create a better boiled egg. I learned how to make an omelet from the film Big Night, changed my life. If there's egg recipe, tell us how you go about making the perfect boiled egg. You can email us, thecurrent at cbc.ca. For You can email us the current at cbc.ca.