Photo via Flickr user Quinn Dombrowski
What a crazy time we live in! From the Higgs boson to holograms of Tupac, it would seem like science has cracked every last secret of the universe. But recently, a team of chemists from UC Irvine and Australia have bested even our virtual Makaveli by devising a way to "unboil" an egg.Now, before we get into that, it's good to understand how an egg transforms from sticky chicken goop into bouncy oval of protein. For that, let's turn to Harold McGee's On Food and Cooking:
Advertisement
Of course, different exposure times and heat levels will alter the final egg, from barely poached to over hard.For the scientists' eggs, they really tangled up those proteins by boiling their chicken ova for a solid 20 minutes. With their eggs thus transformed into sulfurous rubber balls, they then used urea to essentially dissolve the egg albumen—undoing the heating process and returning it to its pre-cooked state. Presto: liquid egg white.And yes, they used urea—a.k.a. the same stuff that's in your wizz.If you're pee-shy, you might not find any solace in the fact that urea is a highly common additive in everything from skincare products and shampoo to dish soap and even some pretzels. The good news is that the vast majority of that urea is synthesized in a lab, not sourced from the bottom of a urinal cake.But why oh why would anyone want to use synthesized piss to uncook an egg in the first place? The answer is not of much use to the food world; it was originally designed as a way to help reuse the "gummy proteins that you spend way too much time scraping off your test tubes," as one of the researchers put it in a UC Irvine press release.That same press release did tout other potential applications of the process, however, including cancer treatments and some (albeit limited) food uses: "[Pharmaceutical] companies currently create cancer antibodies in expensive hamster ovary cells that do not often misfold proteins. The ability to quickly and cheaply re-form common proteins from yeast or E. coli bacteria could potentially streamline protein manufacturing and make cancer treatments more affordable. Industrial cheese makers, farmers and others who use recombinant proteins could also achieve more bang for their buck."And when you think about it, could cheese made with urea be any worse than cheese made with human DNA?The raw egg begins as a liquid because both yolk and white are essentially bags of water containing dispersed protein molecules…When we heat the egg, all its molecules move faster and faster, collide with each other harder and harder, and eventually begin to break the bonds that hold the long protein chains in their compact, folded shape. The proteins unfold, tangle with each other, and bond to each other into a kind of three-dimensional network…The liquid egg thus becomes a moist solid.