Frying Eggs On Car's Roof In 47 Degrees Celsius In Adelaide

Usually, one would need a solid frying pan and some oil to whip up a 3-egg breakfast. But on what happened to be the hottest recorded day in the history of Southern Australia, one could have easily cooked a snack on the hood of their car.

Dr Kamil Zuber, a Foundation Fellow and Research Fellow in the Future Industries Institute at UniSA, along with a group of his fellows, demonstrated just how hot it was on January 24, 2019, by cracking a couple of eggs on the hood and roof of a car sitting out in the sun the entire day.

The recorded temperature was 47.7 degrees Celsius (117.86 degrees Fahrenheit) and the research team gathered up in the parking lot of the University of South Australia with just a few items in hand: an infrared surface thermometer and a carton of eggs (their smartphones don’t count). One of Dr. Zuber’s fellow researchers by the name of Thomas donated his own car to the name of science. He points the infrared thermometer to the hood of his car and measures a whopping 87.6 degrees Celsius (189.67 degrees Fahrenheit). For reference, if you want to cook an egg properly, you would need to cook your ovum on a surface at a minimum of 55 degrees Celsius (or 130 degrees Fahrenheit) for a minimum of 20 minutes. The hood of Thomas’s car is roughly 30% hotter than that, so it should take about 30% less time for an egg to turn a nice sunny side up meal, right?

So our fellow sprays the hood of the car a solid amount of non-stick cooking spray and cracks an egg right then and there. Now, one would think that a scientist would know to take the curvature of the hood into consideration, but the excitement was too great to take such minor variables into account. Lo and behold - curvature [plus] non-stick cooking spray [equals] one egg sliding down to the ground. We might call this one NOT a test, but Dr. Zuber says it’s a partial success, since they could notice the white from the egg starting to set on the hot hood.

It would seem they need something a lot flatter to try their experiment, so the roof of Thomas’s car is the next reasonable choice. As some of the team crack an egg on the roof, the rest do what can only be called a “control” and try to cook an egg into a regular frying pan laid down on the hot asphalt.

An egg takes up to 3 minutes to bring up to a temperature for the proteins inside to start coagulating. According to Dr. Zuber, this amount of time varies depending on the amount of energy stored in the surface that transfers the heat energy to the egg and the amount of energy leftover inside the egg itself.

Big thanks to everyone involved: Thomas, Basti, Christiane, Stojan, Saahar, Sam and Jitesh.

Experiment duration: 1.5 hours

Recorded in Mawson Lakes, SA 24.01.19 between 14:00 - 16:00

The aftermath:
Two eggs left inside the car were found to be fully cooked at the end of the day.

Credit: Kamil Zuber (@Zuber_Kamil)