Latest news with #ErnestoDiMaio
The Guardian
17-02-2025
- Science
- The Guardian
A perfect boiled egg in 32 minutes? Don't let science ruin the joyful imperfection of home cooking
To make pearls of balsamic vinegar, first chill a good amount of olive oil in a tall glass. While it waits in the fridge, in a small saucepan over a medium heat, bring the vinegar and agar-agar to the beginning of a boil – just until the agar-agar has dissolved. Let this mixture cool, remove the oil from the fridge, and use a pipette to drop balls of the agar-stiffened vinegar into the oil to form the pearls. Drain into another container using a small sieve to catch the pearls. Reserve the oil for another use. I remember making these, my first and only foray into what is known as 'molecular gastronomy', in 2013. It was already a bit passe at that time, but the science experiment aspect of creating a simple acidic garnish for a chocolate and strawberry cupcake that Valentine's Day was undoubtedly fun. The lesson influenced how I'd go on to use agar-agar, a seaweed-derived vegan gelatin, in dishes like panna cotta or flan, 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 in Italy. His team found that if you swap an egg between boiling water and 30C water every two minutes for eight cycles, totalling 32 minutes, the egg will be perfectly evenly cooked between white and yolk. New Scientist reported on this finding rather credulously, as though home cooks are truly perplexed about how to boil an egg to their liking. 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 time-consuming. 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. (For what it's worth, dropping eggs into already boiling water and letting them cook for seven minutes is how I get my preferred texture of jammy orange yolk.) In the long history of the relationship between cooking and chemistry, there's often been this kind of push-pull between what is actually going to enliven and enlighten a home cook, and a pursuit of perfection – whether in technique and taste or in nutrition. Indeed, cuisine in the US throughout the early part of the 20th century was defined by a divide between gourmands, who were interested in food and wine for the pleasure it gave them, and the 'scientific cooks', who were obsessed with eating as a means of ingesting the proper amount of vitamins, minerals and calories without any interest in the joys of the table. 'Food science' differs from the restaurant-driven style of molecular cooking because it's usually focused on nutrition, flavour chemistry and shelf stability to the most common ends of creating industrial products. Molecular gastronomy, a term coined in 1988 by Hungarian-born British physicist Nicholas Kurti and French physical chemist Hervé This, has been focused on culinary applications of scientific principles and processes: sous-vide cooking a steak by sealing it in a vacuum bag and cooking it slowly in a water bath; using liquid nitrogen to create a carrot foam; or transforming the texture of olive juice through spherification. These techniques were popularised through El Bulli, Wylie Dufresne's New York City restaurant wd~50, and Grant Achatz's Chicago restaurant Alinea – and the latter is the only one of these still open and wowing diners with apple candy filled with helium that arrives to the table in the form of a balloon. (I've eaten there, and it inspired me to sous-vide slices of rutabaga – swede – again, just once.) Rather than these kinds of perhaps gimmicky tasting-menu ideas, 'innovation' in food these days tends to come in forms that are focused on an ideally sustainable future: plant-based faux meats; chef-driven proprietary seed companies like Dan Barber's Row 7; or strawberries grown indoors year-round by the company Oishii. These are more in line with what food science has always been about, which is precision, uniformity and replication: products that can scale and turn a profit, but retain the culinary considerations learned from molecular gastronomy. If there is to be a scientific touch to food, it's come to be understood that there should be an element of that higher-minded gastronomic purpose afoot in order to convince people of its worth. While it's always been fun to mix scientific approaches with home cooking, what worries me about a focus on 'innovation' for the sake of a 'perfect' squash or strawberry, a profit-driven soy patty, or new techniques for simple things like boiling eggs is that they could have the effect of deterring people from cooking. Learning how to pick fruit or vegetables at the market and getting into the kitchen to cook them will always be acts of trial and error, and they should be fun. Cooking is an experiment, every day, in how water, oil, salt and so many other elements can come together for the purpose of making something delicious. But unlike a laboratory or a factory, the result doesn't need to be the same every single time, or held to a precise scientific standard. Weather, moods and attention all influence how a human cooks – and there's a lot to enjoy in the imperfections. Alicia Kennedy is a food and culture writer and author of No Meat Required: The Cultural History and Culinary Future of Plant-Based Eating, and a forthcoming memoir On Eating: The Making and Unmaking of My Appetites
Observer
07-02-2025
- Science
- Observer
How to boil an egg? Scientists claim to have cracked the Recipe
A colleague approached Ernesto Di Maio, a materials scientist in Naples, Italy, and an expert in plastic foams, with a blunt suggestion: 'You should do something cooler.' The colleague had a project in mind, Dr Di Maio recalled. He wanted a perfectly boiled egg. The task was harder than it might seem, as many home cooks know. The yolk and the egg white, or albumen, have different chemical compositions, which call for different heating temperatures. Dr. Di Maio and his colleagues also welcomed the chance to one-up the Michelin-star chef Carlo Cracco, an egg evangelist who charges $52 for an egg yolk dish at his restaurant in Milan. The scientists devised a way of cooking an egg that requires no special culinary skill or fancy gadgets. It took about 300 eggs, though the researchers 'didn't eat all of them,' said Pellegrino Musto, a polymer expert at the National Research Council of Italy. The researchers said their method, published on Thursday, preserves the distinct textures of the egg as well as its nutritional value. The two parts of the egg require different cooking temperatures because they have different chemical components. 'The albumen is mainly composed of water and proteins,' said Emilia Di Lorenzo, a graduate student in Dr Di Maio's lab at the University of Naples Federico II who recently published a paper on foaming pizza. 'Yolk, on the other hand, is much richer in nutrients.' Hard-boiling an egg is a popular approach that calls for at least 10 minutes of immersion in boiling water. That is long enough for the yolk to be thoroughly cooked. But it's also plenty of time for the albumen's proteins to unfold and clump, expelling water molecules as they become heated. The approach can also create a green ring around the yolk, which indicates the presence of smelly ferrous sulfide. 'Many times people say that they don't like the rubberiness of the egg white, or the graininess of the yolk in a hard-boiled egg,' said Nelson Serrano-Bahri, a chef and the director of innovation at the American Egg Board, the egg industry's main trade association, which has lately been dealing with soaring prices and worries about the bird flu. How to boil an egg? Scientists claim to have cracked the Recipe A soft boil, on the other hand, needs a much shorter cooking period. That keeps the albumen from turning hard — but may also keep the yolk too soft. Ms. Di Lorenzo explained that the yolk is rich in lipids which, when heated, become more fluid. Though some people prefer a runny yolk, others find it revolting. The scientists' new method calls for alternating between boiling and lukewarm water: The egg gets two minutes in 212-degree water, followed by two minutes at 86 degrees, with the cycle repeated eight times. A third method, known as sous vide, cooks an egg for an hour in a water bath of 150 degrees Fahrenheit. That's the ideal temperature for the yolk, but the prolonged exposure is less optimal for the albumen because the water is not hot enough to denature its proteins. Di Lorenzo was blunt about the sous vide approach: 'It's runny. I am not a big fan.' The scientists' new method, derived with the help of fluid dynamics software, calls for alternating between boiling and lukewarm water: The egg gets two minutes in 212-degree water, followed by two minutes at 86 degrees, with the cycle repeated eight times. Dr. Di Maio explained that the average temperature of the two immersions, 150 degrees, is ideal for the yolk, while the hotter bath is sufficient to cook the albumen. 'The very key of our method is to have a well-cooked albumen without wasting the yolk,' Dr. Di Maio said. Relative to the other methods, the periodic baths did a better job of preserving the egg's nutrients, the study found. The authors noted a higher concentration of polyphenols, compounds that protect against DNA damage. 'It's probably brilliant — but who is the method for?' asked Deb Perelman, who runs the popular Smitten Kitchen blog. 'For home cooking, there's always a necessary balance of perfect versus a reasonable effort.' Her preferred foolproof method involves a long ice bath after the egg is cooked. In a recipe for The New York Times, J. Kenji López-Alt proposed steaming the egg in a single inch of water. 'It's a matter of taste,' Ms. Di Lorenzo said. If science is universal, food is deeply personal. Some people even eat raw eggs. There is one big drawback to the new Italian technique. 'It's more difficult to peel the periodic egg because everything is softer,' Dr. Di Maio said. But Serrano-Bahri said that the Egg Board was on the case. 'We are running a study to figure out that,' he said. 'I could have an answer for you in the coming months.' — NYT
New York Times
06-02-2025
- Science
- New York Times
How to Boil an Egg? Scientists Claim to Have Cracked the Recipe.
A colleague approached Ernesto Di Maio, a materials scientist in Naples, Italy, and an expert in plastic foams, with a blunt suggestion: 'You should do something cooler.' The colleague had a project in mind, Dr. Di Maio recalled. He wanted a perfectly boiled egg. The task was harder than it might seem, as many home cooks know. The yolk and the egg white, or albumen, have different chemical compositions, which call for different heating temperatures. Dr. Di Maio and his colleagues also welcomed the chance to one-up the Michelin-star chef Carlo Cracco, an egg evangelist who charges $52 for an egg yolk dish at his restaurant in Milan. The scientists devised a way of cooking an egg that requires no special culinary skill or fancy gadgets. It took about 300 hundred eggs, though the researchers 'didn't eat all of them,' said Pellegrino Musto, a polymer expert at the National Research Council of Italy. The researchers said their method, published on Thursday, preserves the distinct textures of the egg as well as its nutritional value. The two parts of the egg require different cooking temperatures because they have different chemical components. 'The albumen is mainly composed of water and proteins,' said Emilia Di Lorenzo, a graduate student in Dr. Di Maio's lab at the University of Naples Federico II who recently published a paper on foaming pizza. 'Yolk, on the other hand, is much richer in nutrients.' Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
