Hot enough to try to fry an egg?

by Nicole Weston, Posted Aug 6th 2006 @ 10:01AM

We saw a woman try to bake cookies in her car, with good success, yesterday. But the gold standard of "natural" cooking would be frying an egg on the sidewalk, though car engine cooking might be a close second. Many people say that this method works.

Egg whites coagulate between 144 and 149F and yolks need an even higher temperature, so the sidewalk would have to retain a significant amount of heat for the experiment to work. Black asphalt can be 10 degrees hotter than lighter pavement, so you may want to work in the street, to increase your odds of success.

There are any number of people who have attempted to fry an egg on the sidewalk, but the problem is that many people live in places where it doesn't get all that hot. The Alberta Egg Board says that the experiment will work when the temperature is over 35C/95F, but I couldn't find any evidence of that working for anyone. The two hottest videos I found were this one, where it reached 106F just outside of San Francisco recently, and a video in Arizona, where it was also 106F. Neither worked.

I don't know if I believe that this will work, but if you've ever tried it, let us know!

Filed Under: Food Oddities, Spirit of Summer, Food Quest, Ingredients, How To, Methods
Tags: asphalt, cook, cooking, desert, egg, eggs, Food Quest, fried egg, fry, frying, frying eggs, heat, hot enough to fry an egg, natural, oddities, outdoors, sidewalk, summer

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Reader comments (Page 1 of 1)

8-06-2006 @10:24AM Waya said... I'm writing to let you know that we did try the "frying the egg on the driveway" test. And here's the post that I wrote about it. It was so much fun and juvenile. ;-)
http://www.beforebaby.com/waya/2006/07/18/how-do-you-like-your-eggs-cooked/
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8-06-2006 @12:53PM Dr. Electro said... Hi, Nicole. When I was a lad in Pecos, Texas I frequently experienced Summer temperatures near 120F.

Yes, I fried an egg on the sidewalk. I also noticed that the asphalt, which actually melted in places, was hotter.

I grabbed a cast iron skillet and a tablespoon of Mom's Crisco. I headed for the street and cooked an egg. I also ate the egg with toast I made on aluminum foil with the edges turned up. The toast didn't brown but the butter was already melted so I didn't care. I sat on the sidewalk and ate my impromptu brunch.

An even better place to cook was on the flat roof of our house. The temperature up there was blazing. I climbed up there with aluminum foil, a black-spatter finish roaster and all the goodies for a pot roast. I laid the foil out and once again curved it to reflect more sunlight against the roaster. I left the roaster up there from 11 a.m. until 5:30 p.m. The carrots weren't quite tender enough but everything else was delicious. Solar slow cooking works even better than egg frying in hotter climates.
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8-06-2006 @12:54PM Dave said... I bet you did not know about the annual sidewalk egg-fry contest held on July 4 every year in Oatman, AZ:

http://www.oatmangoldroad.com/events.htm

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8-06-2006 @2:51PM Nicole Weston said... Dr.E - I actually have heard that solar cooking works quite well. I think the idea of using your roof was brilliant, too.

Dave - Fascinating! That calls for a road trip next summer, I think.
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8-07-2006 @10:08AM Brian said... A local DC blog tried this very experiment out: http://dc.metblogs.com/archives/2006/08/how_hot_is_it_r.phtml -- though mostly as a way to show that it was, in fact, NOT that hot. They were blasted with a few comments suggesting that trying it out on the street was not the best place and they should have tried an apartment rooftop instead.
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8-07-2006 @4:26PM Dan Tannenbaum said... Actually, here's one for you indoor cooking fans: Take a nice segment of Salmon, the kind you get Salmon steaks from, but don't cut it up. Put it several layers of aluminum foil, along with lots of butter and a nice vegetbale medly. Wrap it so tight it's water proof. Then, place it in the top tray of your dishwasher, and run it through the cycle. Make sure there is no soap! It comes out nice and tender and the veggies are delicious! I saw this once many years ago on a cooking show. I tried it, and it worked out well!
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