When I was young, my mom ended up going out of town for a couple of days, leaving my dad and me to fend for ourselves. At some point during this time, we decided to hard boil some eggs to make egg salad sandwiches for lunch. Unfortunately, neither of us knew how long the eggs should boil — this was before the Internet, so we couldn’t Google it.
I remembered hearing the phrase “three-minute egg” before, so we decided to try that out. Alas, that turned out to be the correct time for a soft-boiled egg and the yolks were still liquid. We put most of the eggs back on to finish, but there was one egg that we’d already peeled before we realized this, and we weren’t sure what to do with it. We didn’t want to put a peeled egg back in the pot, but there was a microwave just sitting there…
Common wisdom states that the egg would now explode in the microwave, but that isn’t exactly what happened. After a minute or two, the egg looked fine and I guessed it was probably done, so we decided to cut it up. I put it on the egg slicer — the kind with an array of metal wires — and pushed down to slice it.
In my memory, this is the point where things seemed to happen in slow motion. I remember that the egg seemed a bit resistant as if it was more rubbery than it should be, so I pressed down harder. I also vividly remember hearing a soft hissing noise caused by the escaping steam and the sudden realization that something was about to go very wrong. Before I could act on that feeling, however, there was a loud ka-boom!
When everything settled down, it turns out no one was injured, but it was a massive cleanup job. As the egg exploded, it exploded through the wires of the slicer and shredded itself, tossing tiny bits of egg all over the kitchen and even into the dining room next to it.
My dad and I cleaned up everything we could find, finished making our sandwiches, and decided that we didn’t really need to mention this incident to my mother when she got home. However, our secrecy was all for naught, as almost as soon as my mom walked in the door she asked, “Did something happen in the kitchen?” She was slightly shorter than my dad and me, and she was standing there looking up with a puzzled expression, trying to figure out why there were tiny bits of egg yolk stuck to the underside of the cabinets. We came clean immediately, and thankfully she got a laugh out of our culinary incompetence.
Since then, I’ve often wondered if I could standardize the process and create a weaponized egg that explodes on impact. The engineer side of me wants to try it out just for curiosity’s sake. However, the adult side of me can’t really think of a good use for such a thing that would be worth the extensive cleanup involved. I suspect I’m destined to never know more details about how to create such a unique egg explosion.
