Introduction
56.7 degrees. That’s the hottest temperature recorded in Furnace Creek Ranch, California, Death Valley, United States. And eggs. That’s a white and yellow reproductive body produced by a chicken, and if you cook it it’s delicious. You can see where this is going.
Can you cook an egg in hot weather?
For the purpose of our convenience, we will assume that we want to serve a nice sunny side up fried egg to our eager customer (we would need much more energy input to raise the temperature of 1 gram of water by 1 degree, in fact we would need 4.18 joules). Our customer is very hungry, he has been working since the morning and it’s lunch time. Luckily, we are at Furnace Creek Ranch, and it’s pretty hot here. 56.7 degrees! Perfect, we can cook an egg for our customer in a jiffy. All we need to do is take an egg from an unsuspecting victim (sorry we need to serve our customer), and head over to our outdoor kitchen to cook our egg. OOPS - you drop the egg on the sizzling pavement (let’s assume it’s concrete, which has a heating capacity of 0.92 joules of energy required to heat 1 gram of concrete by 1 degree).
What you would expect is for it to cook and be edible for our customer to enjoy, yet we wait and wait but it’s still inedible-looking. It’s more of a wet scrambled eggs kind of blob. Surprisingly, 56.7 degrees is not hot enough for an egg to become firm. An egg needs to be cooked at at least 70 degrees to become firm, which fried eggs are. Soooo our customer is left on a very hungry stomach to endure the hottest day in history.
Car Hood?
Wait a minute, we can get hotter. A car hood is made of metal, which is a great conductor of heat. We would need 0.42 joules of energy to raise the temperature of 1 gram of metal by 1 degree, which is around half the amount of energy required for concrete. The temperature of a black Corvette’s hood that’s been in the sun since 8 o’clock is 74.5 degrees1. This is hotter than the 70 we need for the egg to become firm. So we can scoop up the egg that we dropped before, and chuck it onto that car hood2, and voilà, we have whipped up a nice sunny side up fried egg for our restless customer.
Conclusion
Next time you want to cook an egg without using your stove, try using your car hood instead of the sidewalk (I wouldn’t recommend it though). Unfortunately, birds frequently fly above cars and poop…
…so I would rather cook an egg with a frying pan at home, rather than taking the risk of mistaking it for a blob of mayonnaise as I enjoy my nice car hood fried egg.