[Modernist Cuisine] Texture of sous vide eggs: Time *Does* Matter

[Anonymous Modernist 2623]

Hello,

one of my first series of experiments with MC was trying to get my own perfect onsen-egg at home.

Having read the article in MC on pages 4-74 ff and armed with a sous-vide bath, which keeps temperature constant within ±0,01 °C (fusionchef diamond), I thought it to be easy to get there.

So I gave the egg in the bath for 40 min, 63°C , got it, peeled it - no: what I got out was not what I expected. Changing temperatures in subsequent testst showed a certain influence on the result, but textures didn't relate to the pictures on pages 4-76f.

That however was reasonable to expect, as the first sentence on page 4-76 is "Temperature,not time, determines the texture of an egg when cooked".

My search led me to the blog by Martin Lersch who reports his own experiments he did on this subject (part 1, part 2). He was inspired by a paper by César Vega and Ruben Mercadé-Prieto, which was published 2011 in Culinary Biophysics: on the Nature of the 6X°C Egg (follow the link, and you can get the full paper as a pdf document with its interesting plots relating time/temperature with texture).

I continued my experiments and *at once* succeeded when following the data from Vega and Mercadé-Prieto.

Currently, I am quite satisfied with the result, when letting the egg have 75min at 63°C, than give it a finish with 2 min in a bowl with water at 80 °C.

Hope, that helps others too.

The question is open: does the related article in MC need a major overhaul?

[Anonymous Modernist 268]

Good tips. I was disappointed with my first water bath eggs... Creamy yolk, but disappointing runny white. Will have to try again with the quick boil.

The Lersch blog mentions cooling the egg to room temperature after the bath before boiling, though that may have just been for comparison for the pre-boil/post-boil techniques. In your version, do you cool the egg before the finish step?

[Anonymous Modernist 2623]

yes, 10 sec in icecold water.

[Anonymous Modernist 4797]

There is a video demonstration of this from joan roca at harvard on youtube.

http://www.youtube.com/user/Harvard#p/c/546CD09EA2399DAB/1/pGY0HO61Vzo

The translation is poor but they show 62 and 63 degree eggs cooked at 10 minute intervals around 1 hour 30 minutes into the video.