Critical Content: Breaking Some Eggs in the Name of Culinary Science

When I saw an article about how food scientists perfected the cooking of a hen's egg, I had to read it. Then, I was pleasantly surprised to read that the journalist tried to replicate the process herself. Watergate this ain't, but I'll take what I can get.

I've decided that I'm fated to read some things.

Like this article that the Washington Post published about how to cook the perfect egg.

Realize that this article is a freak event in our modern-day dystopia: Somehow, in this 21st Century, a paid journalist wrote a news story about a scientific paper describing a breakthrough method of how to lovingly cook a traditional hen's egg to perfection.

Further, this article was published in the newspaper's hardcopy, which is also approaching oblivion.

The writer, Emily Heil, describes in detail the process Italian food scientists developed to make The Perfect Egg, including the fact that they used 300 eggs to hone their process. It also mentions the food scientists had friends who raise chickens, allowing them to get their eggs for free. While I won't go into the details of their egg-cooking process, I will say that it's a series of heatings and restings that are necessary to reach a point where the yolk reaches its perfect creaminess, and the white approaches its optimal doneness (without being rubbery).

This is the kind of critical content we, the Core Reader, demand.

I, operating on a parallel but less-obsessive path, have burned through a few dozen eggs attempting to master the perfect soft-boiled egg, and the optimal hard-boiled egg. Fortunately, I attacked my obsession when eggs were $1.29 per dozen, as opposed to now, when they're $5-plus, and stores are limiting the number of cartons that can be purchased per visit. Perhaps I've been known to micromanage the egg-cooking in our house.

That level of obsession is hard to hide. It's why my wife pulled the egg edition of the WaPo from its pile and placed it on our supper table.

I fit snugly in the Venn diagram of egg obsession and journalism. Seeing a newspaper manifestation of my obsessions made me feel a bit targeted, but I went ahead and read it. And somehow, I walked away especially gratified.

Not only did Heil rehash the study in mild journalese, she then actually attempted to duplicate the perfect-egg-cooking process from her home. When that failed (which most of us home cooks do), she escalated this tussle by carrying it to the Washington Post test kitchen, which I didn't even know existed.

How could I not add this to Dave Moore Media's Critical Content section?

Watergate this ain't. But the fact that the journalist cared enough to check the science behind an academic paper, that she tried the process both at home, and then, under near-laboratory conditions, renews a bit of my faith in media in general.

Now, if we can just get Jeff Bezos to publish advertisements that call out Elon Musk taking over the U.S. government, maybe we'll know the WaPo is closer to being back on track.

EDITOR's NOTE: NO PUNS WERE COMMITTED IN THE WRITING OF THIS BLOG POST.