Cooking an egg may seem as simple as bringing water to a boil and immersing it; however, in order for it to be “perfect,” a team of researchers proposes “periodic cooking,” which also gives it a higher nutritional content.
The goal is to cook both the yolk and the white optimally, which require two different temperatures, and the method is detailed in a study published in Communications Engineering by a team of Italian researchers.
Periodic cooking: an innovative technique
Periodic cooking involves alternating the egg between a pot of water at one hundred degrees and a bowl at 30 degrees, moving it from one to the other every two minutes for a total of 32 minutes.
“Egg cooks face the challenge of the biphasic structure: the albumen and the yolk require two cooking temperatures. The options are separation or a compromise temperature at the expense of food safety or taste preferences,” write the researchers.
Cooking at two temperatures: the secret to perfect texture
The team discovered that the albumen and yolk can be cooked at two temperatures simultaneously, thus obtaining a uniformly cooked egg with greater nutritional content than those cooked using conventional boiling or vacuum methods.
The method “not only optimizes the texture and nutrients of the egg but is also promising for culinary applications and innovative material treatments,” the authors indicate.
Nutritional benefits of periodic cooking
In chicken eggs, the white is cooked at 85 degrees and the yolk at 65 degrees, so by immersing them at one hundred degrees, the yolk sets completely, while the vacuum method for an hour at 65 degrees leaves the white undercooked.
To develop their method, the team first simulated the process in a computational fluid dynamics program, which suggested the now-described method of periodic cooking.
The next step was to test various forms in real life, cooking eggs with the new technique, in addition to using boiling for hard-boiled, poached, and vacuum-sealed eggs.
Once ready, they checked the texture and sensory qualities of the eggs, as well as evaluated their chemical properties using nuclear magnetic resonance and high-resolution mass spectrometry.
The periodically cooked eggs had a similar soft yolk to a vacuum-sealed egg, and the consistency of the white was between that of a vacuum-sealed egg and a poached one.
Chemical analyses indicated that periodically cooked yolks also contained more polyphenols, micronutrients studied for their health benefits.
Do you already know our YouTube channel? Subscribe!
