Egg exploding in mouth unlikely to damage hearing
A hard-boiled egg that explodes in your mouth is unlikely to cause hearing damage, acoustics experts have concluded.
This odd piece of research was conducted as part of expert witness testimony in litigation against a US restaurant by a man claiming to have suffered severe burns and hearing damage after a microwaved hard-boiled egg exploded in his mouth.
The acoustics experts, Anthony Nash and Lauren von Blohn from the San Francisco-based consulting firm Charles M. Salter Associates, recently presented their research at a meeting of the Acoustical Society of America (ASA) in New Orleans, United States.
In their investigation, they placed nearly 100 hard-boiled, peeled eggs in a water bath and reheated them in a microwave oven.
After they removed the eggs, they pierced them with a fast-acting meat thermometer. About a third of the reheated eggs exploded outside of the oven.
“At one foot (about 30 centimetres) away, the peak sound pressure levels from microwaved eggs covered a wide range from 86 up to 133 decibels,” Nash said in a statement, adding that the likelihood of an egg exploding and damaging someone’s hearing was “quite remote”.
The researchers found the temperature of the egg yolks to be consistently higher than the surrounding water bath and surmise that the yolk’s protein matrix traps many small pockets of superheated water.
When the pockets are disturbed, for example by someone biting into them, they spontaneously boil in a chain reaction leading to an explosion.
For this reason, manufacturers of microwave ovens warn consumers of the danger of reheating certain foods, including potatoes and eggs. – dpa