The Eggsperiment

There are moments when modern life hands you a small, ridiculous victory. This was one of them.

I had read, somewhere on the internet, that you can boil a chicken egg in an airfryer. Already this feels like heresy. The airfryer is supposed to crisp, not poach. It is the machine equivalent of a smug fitness influencer claiming it can also do mindfulness. Still, curiosity won.

We do not, however, eat chicken eggs. That would be slumming it. We eat duck eggs, which are to chicken eggs what a proper engineering drawing is to a biro sketch. Bigger, richer, structurally more serious. So clearly the regulation nine minutes would not do. This required adjustment. Science was consulted. Experience was invoked. Two minutes were added.

The egg went in. One duck egg. One airfryer. One hundred and fifty degrees. Eleven minutes. No water. No pan. No rolling boil. Just hot circulating air and quiet confidence.

With two minutes to go, I set the toast to toast. This matters. Timing is everything. This was not guesswork. This was coordination. Breakfast as a system, not a sequence of damp improvisations.

When the egg came out, it looked unchanged, which is always the worrying part. Eggs give nothing away. You only find out whether you’ve succeeded when it is far too late to correct the error.

There is, however, a critical post-operation step. You must stop the cooking. Not theatrically. No ice baths or culinary spa treatments. Just a cup of cold water. A brief plunge. A few seconds. Enough to say, politely but firmly, “that will do”.

I do not peel a boiled egg. That way lies mess and pointless fiddling. I slice the top off. Cleanly. Decisively. This is an egg, not a puzzle box.

Perfection.

Set white. Fully cooked but not chalky. Yolk gloriously molten, as if it had been briefed in advance. No sulphur. No grey ring. No apology required. The toast arrived at exactly the right moment, butter melting on contact, suggesting forethought. Which, of course, there had been.

There is also the small matter of energy efficiency. A pan of water must be coaxed into boiling. It sits there absorbing heat, demanding patience and fuel while doing nothing useful. The airfryer delivers heat immediately, directly, and only to the thing you actually want cooked. No litres of water brought reluctantly to temperature. No waiting. No waste.

At this point you are meant to pretend this is normal. It is not. I have boiled eggs in pans for decades. I have watched water boil and counted minutes like a Victorian railway guard. All of that is now optional. You can put an egg in a countertop box of hot air, stop it cooking with a splash of cold water, synchronise the toast, remove the lid with a knife, and carry on with your morning.

This is how civilisation collapses. Not with a bang, but with an airfryer quietly outperforming everything else in the kitchen.

Of course, this will enrage purists. There will be muttering about tradition and how eggs have always been boiled in pans. These people are still adjusting dampers on coal ranges and eyeing electricity with suspicion.

The airfryer does not care. It does not argue. It simply produces a perfectly cooked duck egg, efficiently and on schedule, and waits patiently for the next task.

I will, reluctantly, be doing this again, but with 2 eggs. I only did one this time as it was an experiment.