Soft Boiled Eggs - A question for programmers
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Based on my old career of contract programming, I can give you an accurate answer but first I need to know a few things: Sea level or at altitude? If at altitude what altitude? Egg size? Egg pre-cooking temperature? Volume of water in the pot? Factory eggs or free run? Brown eggs or white? Actually what I would do is go and buy and egg timer, one of the old school kind that you flip over and watch sand run out of it. They sell them for soft and hard boiled, I saw them in the kitchen store the other day.
actually, current atmospheric pressure matters too. Egg density, or at least species of the egg's parent. :)
_________________________ Asu no koto o ieba, tenjo de nezumi ga warau. Talk about things of tomorrow and the mice in the ceiling laugh. (Japanese Proverb)
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Not a programming question, just curious, how quickly you come up with the answer. We have soft boiled eggs for breakfast most mornings, and it's interesting how my girlfriend likes them soft, I like them a little less gooey, and my son doesn't like any goo at all, but not cooked to the point where the golden yolk has gone supernova and turned into a dry, black hole. One of the directions I've come across requires boiling the water, putting the eggs in, then simmering the eggs for 5 minutes and 20 seconds after coming back to a boil. Now, the timer on the stove is annoying. First off, you can only set it in 1 minute increments. Second, it displays only the minutes remaining until the last minute. At the last minute, it beeps, and then counts down the seconds. So, using the just the stove's timer, how do you cook and egg for 5 minutes and 20 seconds, just by setting it once? Now, the odd thing about this is, I, as a supposedly intelligent problem solver, ditched the stove timer altogether and used my cell phone's stopwatch to time the eggs. It was only after a couple of weeks of doing this that I realized I didn't need the stopwatch! Sigh. What was that thread about thinking outside of the box, only just a little? BTW, I modified the egg cooking procedure to something where I don't have to figure out whether the eggs+water have returned to full boil. Instead, now I boil the water, place the room temperature eggs in the water, and wait for 6 minutes and 30 seconds. I then turn off the heat, take my girlfriend's egg out and put it under cold water for about 15 seconds. Then I do the same with mine, then my son's. They come out perfect for each one of us every time! These are fairly large eggs, if I have smaller eggs, I usually shave off an entire minute. Marc
People are just notoriously impossible. --DavidCrow
There's NO excuse for not commenting your code. -- John Simmons / outlaw programmer
People who say that they will refactor their code later to make it "good" don't understand refactoring, nor the art and craft of programming. -- Josh SmithOk, first, you have to fill out a specification change form and submit it to the PLM, who in-turn, must take that specification and create a requirements document from that, and submit it to a peer-review committee. Following their approval, you can then go purchase a brand new stove timer that allows both mins and seconds. Following this, you'll contract with an "approved" Stove Timer Installer; who will schedule an appointment with you 2 weeks from today between the hours of 9am and 5pm ... so you'll need to stay home all day until he gets there. Following successful installation of your new timer, and assuming the tech didn't break your stove, take the bill for the hardware and the contract labor, and submit a reimbursement request to accounting. Allowing for their 6-10 business week turn-around time and assuming they even make the check out to the right person you can finally make yourself some waffles; because all the eggs you did have sitting around, waiting for this mess, would have gone bad by now. Problem solved. :->
:..::. Douglas H. Troy ::..
Bad Astronomy |VCF|wxWidgets|WTL -
Based on my old career of contract programming, I can give you an accurate answer but first I need to know a few things: Sea level or at altitude? If at altitude what altitude? Egg size? Egg pre-cooking temperature? Volume of water in the pot? Factory eggs or free run? Brown eggs or white? Actually what I would do is go and buy and egg timer, one of the old school kind that you flip over and watch sand run out of it. They sell them for soft and hard boiled, I saw them in the kitchen store the other day.
Yet you assume they're chicken eggs
-- Help me! I'm turning into a grapefruit! Buzzwords!
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A friend was discussing boiled eggs the other day - being from England he described the state where the white was quite cooked but the yellow still liquid as 'middle in'. Made me wonder if that's where the phrase 'fair to middlin' comes from. Right, we now return to 'Cooking with Marc' :)
I think your friend just made that up - I've never heard the phrase, and google doesn't seem to find any, either
-- Help me! I'm turning into a grapefruit! Buzzwords!
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I think your friend just made that up - I've never heard the phrase, and google doesn't seem to find any, either
-- Help me! I'm turning into a grapefruit! Buzzwords!
I dunno - we're talking 1940's early 1950's - small town Jolly Old here. The phrase could have been in common use. If only they'd had Google back then... :|
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Yet you assume they're chicken eggs
-- Help me! I'm turning into a grapefruit! Buzzwords!
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Hey I have work to do! :) If someone pays me I'm quite certain I could write a 42 page specifications document on this without hardly even trying.
Only if it includes a detailed material safety data sheet with appropriate action if uncooked (or cooked) egg is swallowed or inhaled. Don't forget the MSDS for the water too since it must be boiled.
_________________________ Asu no koto o ieba, tenjo de nezumi ga warau. Talk about things of tomorrow and the mice in the ceiling laugh. (Japanese Proverb)
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Based on my old career of contract programming, I can give you an accurate answer but first I need to know a few things: Sea level or at altitude? If at altitude what altitude? Egg size? Egg pre-cooking temperature? Volume of water in the pot? Factory eggs or free run? Brown eggs or white? Actually what I would do is go and buy and egg timer, one of the old school kind that you flip over and watch sand run out of it. They sell them for soft and hard boiled, I saw them in the kitchen store the other day.
John Cardinal wrote:
Factory eggs
Factory Eggs? WTF is a factory egg? I have yet to see an egg that is made in a factory? Or are you talking about those egg shaped candies that come out around easter time?
You may be right
I may be crazy
-- Billy Joel --Within you lies the power for good, use it!!!
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I think your friend just made that up - I've never heard the phrase, and google doesn't seem to find any, either
-- Help me! I'm turning into a grapefruit! Buzzwords!
try searching fair to middling, you will find results. Here is one: http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-fai4.htm[^]
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Not a programming question, just curious, how quickly you come up with the answer. We have soft boiled eggs for breakfast most mornings, and it's interesting how my girlfriend likes them soft, I like them a little less gooey, and my son doesn't like any goo at all, but not cooked to the point where the golden yolk has gone supernova and turned into a dry, black hole. One of the directions I've come across requires boiling the water, putting the eggs in, then simmering the eggs for 5 minutes and 20 seconds after coming back to a boil. Now, the timer on the stove is annoying. First off, you can only set it in 1 minute increments. Second, it displays only the minutes remaining until the last minute. At the last minute, it beeps, and then counts down the seconds. So, using the just the stove's timer, how do you cook and egg for 5 minutes and 20 seconds, just by setting it once? Now, the odd thing about this is, I, as a supposedly intelligent problem solver, ditched the stove timer altogether and used my cell phone's stopwatch to time the eggs. It was only after a couple of weeks of doing this that I realized I didn't need the stopwatch! Sigh. What was that thread about thinking outside of the box, only just a little? BTW, I modified the egg cooking procedure to something where I don't have to figure out whether the eggs+water have returned to full boil. Instead, now I boil the water, place the room temperature eggs in the water, and wait for 6 minutes and 30 seconds. I then turn off the heat, take my girlfriend's egg out and put it under cold water for about 15 seconds. Then I do the same with mine, then my son's. They come out perfect for each one of us every time! These are fairly large eggs, if I have smaller eggs, I usually shave off an entire minute. Marc
People are just notoriously impossible. --DavidCrow
There's NO excuse for not commenting your code. -- John Simmons / outlaw programmer
People who say that they will refactor their code later to make it "good" don't understand refactoring, nor the art and craft of programming. -- Josh SmithI just use this[^]. No worrying about altitude, finding timers, etc.
every night, i kneel at the foot of my bed and thank the Great Overseeing Politicians for protecting my freedoms by reducing their number, as if they were deer in a state park. -- Chris Losinger, Online Poker Players?
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John Cardinal wrote:
Factory eggs
Factory Eggs? WTF is a factory egg? I have yet to see an egg that is made in a factory? Or are you talking about those egg shaped candies that come out around easter time?
You may be right
I may be crazy
-- Billy Joel --Within you lies the power for good, use it!!!
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A friend was discussing boiled eggs the other day - being from England he described the state where the white was quite cooked but the yellow still liquid as 'middle in'. Made me wonder if that's where the phrase 'fair to middlin' comes from. Right, we now return to 'Cooking with Marc' :)
> 'fair to middlin' ... That's a blast from the past... I last heard it in the 1980's from my grandfather... whenever someone used to ask him how he was doing, he would say "oh, fair to middlin" (although *I* thought he was saying "fair to midland" -- but perhaps you are correct). In any case, I always wondered what it meant.
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I just use this[^]. No worrying about altitude, finding timers, etc.
every night, i kneel at the foot of my bed and thank the Great Overseeing Politicians for protecting my freedoms by reducing their number, as if they were deer in a state park. -- Chris Losinger, Online Poker Players?
And if you have a bigger budget, you could buy an MRI machine. ;P
Matt Gerrans
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I do that, but it's more because of the crazy psycho drivers around here!
-- Help me! I'm turning into a grapefruit! Buzzwords!
I have driven the "wrong" way on a one-way street.
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I'm talking about the very grim type of eggs that come from places like this: http://www.factoryfarming.com/gallery/hens7.htm[^]
You know, I could try and argue with you about what a pile steaming dung that site, and sites like it, contain. But that would be like arguing religion or politics in the soapbox, totally useless. I work in the industry, I know that there is no way a decent farmer would mistreat his animals. An animal that is not happy is an animal that does not produce to it's full potential. One can always look at a picture of the worst of the worst and if it fits your agenda paint an entire industry with that brush. I have seen pictures of mistreated cats and dogs, so should I assume that all cats and dogs are treated that way? Should cats and dogs be banned from private homes as we cannot trust that people can take care of them? I just wish people would get a real clue about what happens on the farm, rather than believing what they read and see on crap politically biased sites like the one you linked.
You may be right
I may be crazy
-- Billy Joel --Within you lies the power for good, use it!!!
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You know, I could try and argue with you about what a pile steaming dung that site, and sites like it, contain. But that would be like arguing religion or politics in the soapbox, totally useless. I work in the industry, I know that there is no way a decent farmer would mistreat his animals. An animal that is not happy is an animal that does not produce to it's full potential. One can always look at a picture of the worst of the worst and if it fits your agenda paint an entire industry with that brush. I have seen pictures of mistreated cats and dogs, so should I assume that all cats and dogs are treated that way? Should cats and dogs be banned from private homes as we cannot trust that people can take care of them? I just wish people would get a real clue about what happens on the farm, rather than believing what they read and see on crap politically biased sites like the one you linked.
You may be right
I may be crazy
-- Billy Joel --Within you lies the power for good, use it!!!
Heh heh. I understand completely. You'd get no argument from me. I just grabbed the first picture I could find to illustrate my mental concept of a factory egg. Oddly enough I've seen similarly treated chickens on television lately in several programs, and it was incidental to what the program was about and not at all a show with an agenda etc. I have no basis to judge it either way, I've never personally been to an egg producing farm before. If the egg producers want to combat this negative stereotype they should put up web cams of their chickens and pictures of the chickens in their habitat on the cartons. I always buy freerange eggs because the yolks are nicer (they're brighter, the yolk sits up from the egg white properly and you can really tell when you cook with them, a french omelette is so much nicer with good eggs). So I come at it from a food point of view. I wish that the local farmers would make more of an effort to sell locally, at a premium is fine by me if it's better quality. All I can ever find are eggs and milk even though there are hundreds of farms raising all sorts of stuff from veggies to sheep to cattle, pigs etc etc. It's damn near impossible to find any local produce around here. The only way we've discovered is by driving all over hells half acre until you bump into a produce stand that happens to be selling stuff (we've found two out of hundreds of local farms) and when you go in they are selling some of their produce but a lot of stuff in boxes from california etc. It could be such a cool win-win for everyone, but it's done very poorly. I don't know exactly who is to blame but it seems insane to me to be buying bell peppers from Israel when they grow them down the road in acres and acres. At least here on Vancouver Island, don't know about the rest of the world.
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Set it for 6 minutes and stop boiling when 40 seconds remain.
Red Stateler wrote:
Set it for 6 minutes and stop boiling when 40 seconds remain.
Exactly. And it took me two weeks or so to figure that out. :laugh: Marc
People are just notoriously impossible. --DavidCrow
There's NO excuse for not commenting your code. -- John Simmons / outlaw programmer
People who say that they will refactor their code later to make it "good" don't understand refactoring, nor the art and craft of programming. -- Josh Smith -
Heh heh. I understand completely. You'd get no argument from me. I just grabbed the first picture I could find to illustrate my mental concept of a factory egg. Oddly enough I've seen similarly treated chickens on television lately in several programs, and it was incidental to what the program was about and not at all a show with an agenda etc. I have no basis to judge it either way, I've never personally been to an egg producing farm before. If the egg producers want to combat this negative stereotype they should put up web cams of their chickens and pictures of the chickens in their habitat on the cartons. I always buy freerange eggs because the yolks are nicer (they're brighter, the yolk sits up from the egg white properly and you can really tell when you cook with them, a french omelette is so much nicer with good eggs). So I come at it from a food point of view. I wish that the local farmers would make more of an effort to sell locally, at a premium is fine by me if it's better quality. All I can ever find are eggs and milk even though there are hundreds of farms raising all sorts of stuff from veggies to sheep to cattle, pigs etc etc. It's damn near impossible to find any local produce around here. The only way we've discovered is by driving all over hells half acre until you bump into a produce stand that happens to be selling stuff (we've found two out of hundreds of local farms) and when you go in they are selling some of their produce but a lot of stuff in boxes from california etc. It could be such a cool win-win for everyone, but it's done very poorly. I don't know exactly who is to blame but it seems insane to me to be buying bell peppers from Israel when they grow them down the road in acres and acres. At least here on Vancouver Island, don't know about the rest of the world.
John Cardinal wrote:
I always buy freerange eggs because the yolks are nicer (they're brighter, the yolk sits up from the egg white properly and you can really tell when you cook with them, a french omelette is so much nicer with good eggs). So I come at it from a food point of view.
I can appreciate that. The main difference in egg yolks is the feed the chickens eat. Free range birds have access to all the insects that run around the yard so that effects the colour and consistancy of the yolks. You may like it, but when commercial growers change the birds diet to reflect what you like the average consumer complains because the yolks are *too* yellow. It is a no win situation. The commercial growers just try to produce the best quality product, for the lowest cost, in the most humane way possible, that fills the market demands.
You may be right
I may be crazy
-- Billy Joel --Within you lies the power for good, use it!!!
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John Cardinal wrote:
I always buy freerange eggs because the yolks are nicer (they're brighter, the yolk sits up from the egg white properly and you can really tell when you cook with them, a french omelette is so much nicer with good eggs). So I come at it from a food point of view.
I can appreciate that. The main difference in egg yolks is the feed the chickens eat. Free range birds have access to all the insects that run around the yard so that effects the colour and consistancy of the yolks. You may like it, but when commercial growers change the birds diet to reflect what you like the average consumer complains because the yolks are *too* yellow. It is a no win situation. The commercial growers just try to produce the best quality product, for the lowest cost, in the most humane way possible, that fills the market demands.
You may be right
I may be crazy
-- Billy Joel --Within you lies the power for good, use it!!!
It's not just the yellowness of it, the fresher an egg is the more defined and separate the yolk is from the white. If you crack it into a bowl the yolk sort of stands up from the white. As the eggs age the yolk slumps more into the white. Same for the free range ones we buy, maybe their just fresher I don't know for sure but they look better, taste better and make a nice gooey , creamy omelette. Maybe I should just get some chickens. ;)
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It's not just the yellowness of it, the fresher an egg is the more defined and separate the yolk is from the white. If you crack it into a bowl the yolk sort of stands up from the white. As the eggs age the yolk slumps more into the white. Same for the free range ones we buy, maybe their just fresher I don't know for sure but they look better, taste better and make a nice gooey , creamy omelette. Maybe I should just get some chickens. ;)