Name: Why Does Cooking Eggs Make Them Hard?
Uploaded: 2021-05-07T03:40:11.000Z
Duration: 4 min 26 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Hi there! It's snack time here at the Fort,

so Squeaks and I are taking a quick  break from our busy day to eat.

Oh, I brought something new  for a snack today, Squeaks.

I can crunch up the shell a bit,  then peel it off with my hands…

and then a little sprinkle  of salt for flavor, and yum!

Hard-boiled eggs are quite a  bit different from raw ones.

They might look the same on  the outside, but boiling an egg

When you crack open a raw egg,  there's a clear, goopy, liquid part,

called the egg white, and a  smaller circle of yellow liquid,

The egg white has turned white and firmed  up into the shape of, well, an egg.

And inside of it, we can  see that the yolk has become

a solid, yellow circle, with  a kind of crumbly texture.

Well, Squeaks, the inside of this  egg became solid when I boiled it.

Cooking food in different ways, like boiling,

When you boil food, you're  heating that food up a lot

And that can do some really  strange things to food:

carrots get softer, butter  and ice cream melt, and eggs,

How about this: what do we know about eggs?

And they're also really good  for us. Do you remember why?

And proteins are a kind of nutrient that we need!

That's right Squeaks!—proteins can  help people to grow strong muscles.

And they're also why cooked eggs are hard!

If you had a really powerful  microscope, you could actually

zoom in and see all the proteins inside a raw egg!

They would kind of look like  folded laundry floating in water.

But when you boil the egg, the  heat makes the proteins unfold.

And the parts that unfold are really sticky —

so when the unfolded proteins bump  into each other, they get stuck!

After about 12 minutes, most  of the nicely folded proteins

end up stuck together into big, messy clumps.

And then if you zoomed back out, you'd see that

all those clumpy proteins make a solid egg.

Now, what do you think will happen to  our solid egg when it cools back down?

Ah you got it! Even though the heat is gone,

the proteins stay stuck  together, so the egg stays solid.

That means you can't "uncook"  an egg by putting it in ice.

Ooo, but what if I took the egg out earlier —

That's right! It takes time for the  proteins to unfold and stick together.

So, if you pull the egg out of the water earlier,

it's somewhere in between goopy and solid.

The longer we boil and heat  an egg, the more proteins

can clump together, and the firmer  the inside of the egg becomes.

Some people actually choose to  pull their eggs out earlier,

because they like the middles  of their eggs to be a bit runny!

Ooo they do sound yummy, don't  they? You want to try making some?

Cooking things can make some  big changes to your foods,

so it's a great way to try  some at home experiments.

With a grown-up's help, you can try soft-boiling

and hard-boiling eggs, too, and  observe the different textures.

And remember, if you'd like to  keep exploring with me, Squeaks,

Mister Brown, and all of our friends,  make sure to hit the subscribe button.

We'll see you next time, here at the Fort.

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Why Does Cooking Eggs Make Them Hard?

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