boiled eggs, on the other hand, should have fully set whites
with liquid yolks that ooze out like a soft custard, bathing
your toast in their golden flow and enriching your crisp
bacon. There’s more to boiling an egg than meets the eye.
Much more.
Nearly every basic cookbook offers a different technique
for how it should be done: start the egg in cold water, or
gently lower it into boiling water; add vinegar to the water to
lower its pH, or add baking soda to the water to raise it;
cover the pot, or don’t cover it; use old eggs, or use new
eggs; and on and on. But very few offer evidence as to why
any one of these techniques should work any better than
another. Apparently, boiling eggs is not . . . ahem . . . an
eggsact science. Let’s try and change that.
What Is Boiling?
First things first: what exactly is boiling? The technical
definition is that it is what occurs when the vapor pressure
of a liquid is greater than or equal to the atmospheric
pressure that surrounds it. Let’s go back to the chicken coop
analogy we used here. Your pot of water is a coop full of
chickens. The chickens tend to like each other and happily
stick together inside the coop. Now, let’s say we start adding
energy to the mix by switching their water supply out with
coffee. With the added energy, the chickens begin to
become hyperactive—one or two of them might even be so
energetic as to be able to jump the fence and escape. Add
enough energy to the mix, and eventually the chickens will
become so hyperactive that they’ll tear down the fence and
begin escaping very rapidly indeed.