A 32-minute boiled egg? Don't let science ruin the joy of home cooking

I remember making pearls of balsamic vinegar, my first and only foray into what is known as "molecular gastronomy", in 2013.

- Alicia Kennedy

It was already a bit passe at that time, but the science experiment aspect - using a pipette to drop balls of agar-stiffened vinegar into oil - of creating a simple acidic garnish for a chocolate and strawberry cupcake was undoubtedly fun. I'd go on to use agar-agar, a vegan gelatine, in dishes like panna cotta, but I never made the pearls again. They were a novelty, and now I have a fond memory of cosplaying as Ferran Adrià, a Spanish chef who popularised these sorts of processes through the restaurant El Bulli.

The pearls came to mind while reading about an experiment conducted by Ernesto Di Maio at the University of Naples. His team found that swapping an egg between boiling water and 30C water every two minutes for eight cycles, totalling 32 minutes, results in an egg perfectly evenly cooked between white and yolk.

Rather than cooking science that's about making something pretty and fun, like the vinegar pearls, this experiment was about making an instance of everyday cooking labour intensive, water-wasteful and timeconsuming. I could see someone doing this experiment once, the way I made the vinegar pearls, and then going back to their tried-and-true method.