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 Boiling water is the same thing The water molecules are trapped in the pot and kept in place by their own fence—the pressure of the air in the atmosphere pushing down on them Add energy to the pot in the form of heat, and water molecules begin to start leaping off the surface of the water This is called evaporation Eventually the pressure produced by the water molecules trying to escape becomes equal to or greater than the pressure of the atmosphere pushing down on it The fence breaks, the floodgates open, and water molecules rapidly jump from a liquid state to gas, bubbling up violently This conversion of liquid water to water vapor (steam) is what you see when you look at a pot of boiling water; with pure water at sea level, this occurs at 212°F (100°C) Here’s a quick rundown of what happens when you bring a pot of water to a boil: • Quivering: At between 130° and 170°F, tiny bubbles of water vapor begin forming at nucleation sites (more on those later) along the bottom and sides of the pot They won’t be large enough to actually jump and rise to the surface of the water, but their formation will cause the top surface to quiver a bit ...Boiling water is the same thing The water molecules are trapped in the pot and kept in place by their own fence? ?the pressure of the air in the atmosphere pushing down on them Add energy to the pot in the. .. (more on those later) along the bottom and sides of the pot They won’t be large enough to actually jump and rise to the surface of the water, but their formation will cause the top surface to quiver a bit... molecules begin to start leaping off the surface of the water This is called evaporation Eventually the pressure produced by the water molecules trying to escape becomes equal to or greater than the pressure of the atmosphere