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#crit101 Egg Research - Group 4
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Introduction

Methodology and Findings

Conclusions

References

Appendices

Discussion:

Links

#crit101: Week Two - Research and Enquiry

What is the best way to cook an egg?

Introduction

Eggs: there are so many ways to cook an egg, but which is best? Our task was to find out...

This was a challenging task because there is no measure of ‘best’, it’s all about your personal opinion. When conducting our research we first had to decide what is meant by best. Healthiness? Speed? Taste? Or a combination of them all? We also had to make sure that we included both primary and secondary research and used triangulation.

Given the limited amount of time we had to: firstly, know the other participants, secondly, decide of a strategy, thirdly, run it and adjust. It sounded reasonable to start small and begin defining each key terms:

Methodology and Findings

This website shows information about a survey carried out on 1,010 adults across the UK about their favourite way to cook eggs. It suggests that your preferred way to cook an egg depends on many aspects such as personality, lifestyle, social class and where you live.

Research through the web lead me to a culinary skills websites, which includes tips and tricks from equipment to preparation (Deliaonline.com). Delia talks about how cooking an egg, even something as simple as that, demands some care and attention. Delia shares some of her expertise and tips on this site. These tips should prove beneficial, even for someone like myself who has little or none culinary magic. Reading through some of her tips are very relatable and for someone likes me who enjoys cooking a bacon and egg sandwich, it does hold some answers.

- Do not cook eggs freshly taken out of the fridge, as they are liable to crack easier

- Always use a kitchen timer, trying to guess the time the egg has been cooking can be risky as you can easily overdo or under do the egg.

- During the boiling process, because some air pockets may be left inside the egg, it can build up pressure and that allows the eggshell to crack. This is why you may see strands of yolk in the water.

- Cook the eggs in a small saucepan, as eggs with too much room in the pan, sometimes go walkies around the pan and are likely to hit each other and again, crack.

- Never have fast boiling water, as a simmer is all they need to cook through

- Never over boil eggs as the yolk can turn black and the texture becomes rubber

- If eggs are very fresh (less than four days old) an extra 30 seconds off cooking time should be added.

I did try some of the methods here yesterday morning. However, the one that concerns me is the putting a pin through the top of the eggs to release the air pocket. I can understand why someone would do it, but its not strictly speaking necessary. I mean, unless you are a perfectionist, not a lot of point to do this tedious practice as the chance of yolk spilling out isn’t that high anyway. Nonetheless, one tip Delia provided that proved to work effectively and efficiently was the small saucepan which reduces the amount of contact between the eggs which did make all of eggs cook thorough as they were not moving around on their own will.

Our first stage of research was enquiry. The first stage of this was to define key words. We had to debate what ‘best’ meant, what ways you can cook an egg and

As part of our primary research, we created a survey to find out what people think of as ‘best’ and based on this, which way they prefer to cook their eggs.

I looked at another survey somebody else had done. The top result was scrambled, followed closely by fried.

As of 03/02/2013 10:05am (form time stamp) here are results to a form Emma created

 

Fried

Hard boiled

Soft boiled

Omelette

Poached

Scrambled

Total

Ease

1

1

Healthiness

2

2

4

Speed

1

1

2

Taste

3

1

5

3

4

5

21

Other

1

1

Total

4

2

7

6

5

5

29

Conclusions

Statistically this has little value since the panel doesn’t count enough people supposedly representing a general, average population. Nevertheless we may already see 2 factors that seem to stick out: scrambled would be how most surveyees would like their eggs and Taste over speed, easy, healthiness would be what they’d judge the recipe by.

To try and check that our findings were correct, we decided to look at another online survey.

References

Appendices

Discussion:

hello

What’s the plan here guys? - Connor.

I guess we need to 1: brain storm over ways of understanding the question (so as to cover all possible aspects, I started with best, ways, egg, … it has been completed later this week), 2: treat each part with recipes, arguments, etc. 3: report all sources with links to websites, forums, … - Pascal

Should we split up the tasks to all focus on a different area? We need primary and secondary evidence, so we need to find out some recipe, how healthy they are, how quick they are, we could also do some sort of questionnaire to see how people prefer their  eggs cooked. I created a survey, please check it out on twitter and share it so that your followers can compete it too! Let me know what you think, and if you want me to change anything. https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1ZIZnG9plXAzz-TV3QFtGViub40A4FhureqbJmf-jPpk/viewformWe could also try cooking some different eggs to see which way we find  easier as primary evidence too! - Emma

This is super Emma, I will use my network on as many platforms as I can. Question: I added a pivot table (2nd tab) but can’t seem to be able to get anything than … 0. Can someone, anyone have a look at it and maybe fix it - Pascal

I think the pivot table is a great idea, I tried to changes it but can't either! Emma

I finally got it right, now wouldn’t it be great to embed it (and have it update automatically) in here. - Pascal

PLEASE CAN SOMEONE HELP WITH THE REFERENCES BECAUSE I AM CONFUSED! Emma

Links