"The Kitchen As Laboratory": Measuring the Texture of Egg Yolks
Yolks in the Rheometer Cesar VegaA collection of essays about every aspect of culinary science shows how much more there is to understand about even the most familiar items One of the most fascinating threads running through The Kitchen As Laboratory, a collection of essays edited by a trio of food scientists and published earlier this year, is the application of rigorous testing and measurement to a realm that has classically been very subjective. In the test pictured above, after egg yolks are poached at a constant temperature for a varying number of minutes, a rheometer is used to precisely measure the resulting texture, in pascal-seconds. Cesar Vega, a culinary scientist at Mars Botanical, used the rheometer to debunk the contemporary received wisdom that the texture of a cooked egg is a function of temperature but not time. He demonstrated that eggs' textures become increasingly thick as a...