Hard-boiled or soft?

Posted on April 14th, 2008 by admin

You wouldn’t think that a move from the Highveld to the coast would affect ones cooking strategy, but it does, in no uncertain terms. Take a simple item like a boiled egg. Fussy eater that I am, I like my eggs boiled for such a time that when I come to eat them, the yolk is soft and the white completely set. How an egg turns out depend upon several factors:

  • The size of the egg
  • The thickness of its shell
  • The length of time it is immersed in boiling water
  • The temperature of the boiling water
  • The atmospheric pressure

    • You might thing I’m being a little too exacting here, but facts are facts. On an average day in the Highveld, a jumbo-sized egg with an average shell thickness takes exactly seven minutes to be cooked to my liking. Cook it for the same time at the coast and you’ll get a hard-boiled egg. Why? The reason is that the Highveld is between five and six thousand feet above sea level, so the atmospheric pressure at that altitude is much less – result, water boils at a lower temperature and so it takes longer to cook something. At the coast my jumbo egg takes five minutes.

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