In 2025, scientists announced they’d finally solved the boiled egg — the catch is that it takes 32 minutes and you have to shuttle it between two pans of water every two minutes, because yolk and white were never meant to share a temperature

The yolk is composed of a different set of proteins, primarily livetins and phosvitin, which denature at approximately 65 degrees Celsius. These are two different materials, with two different optimal cooking temperatures, and they happen to be packaged in the same shell. Every conventional method of cooking an egg is, at some level, a compromise between the two. The specific temperature profile the simulation suggested, and then confirmed experimentally with 300 real eggs, was the two-minute shuttle. Getting the microstructure of a polymer right often depends on the specific temperature profile it is exposed to during processing.