The scientifically perfect way to boil an egg has just been discovered.

[sir pball]

I'm not even kidding – the procedure was published as a full paper in friggin' Nature on Thursday.

Long story short, every prior method (hard boiling, soft boiling, sous vide) is imperfect; the yolk and white need two different temperatures to be cooked to perfection, so simply bringing the egg to a uniform temperature will never work properly. By alternating between water baths of two different temperatures for specific times, it's possible to cook the two different parts perfectly. You'll still need a circulator ("sous vide machine" ) to hold a bath at a steady 30˚C, but those are hardly uncommon these days.

For those of you who don't want to slog through a Serious Scientific Paper (really, there's thermodynamics and charts and and and, it is NOT an easy read), the procedure is actually really simple. The eggs get a cycle of a 100˚C, boiling, bath for 2 minutes, then a 30˚C bath for 2 minutes, repeated 8 times. Yes, you're gonna have to stand there for 32 minutes with a 2-minute timer, but a small cost for perfection!

Full paper, they were kind enough to publish it open-access: https://www.nature.com/articles/s44172-024-00334-w