There are foods that come out revitalized from the microwave oven, while others end up horrible. The egg usually falls into the second category, but it also carries an additional risk that not everyone knows. Manufacturers indicate that heating water for too long in the microwave is dangerous, but they also issue the same warning for hard-boiled eggs, which could basically turn into grenades…
Some things should never end up inside the microwave. Metals top the list, and then we find certain preparations that become "soggy" after being reheated, but what brings us here today is the humble hard-boiled egg (read as boiled or cooked). While it can get us out of a fix at three in the morning when hunger strikes without mercy, putting a hard-boiled egg in the microwave is a terrible idea. Distributors of pre-boiled eggs (yes, they come peeled and ready to eat) put a warning on the package not to heat the product in the microwave… but that hasn't stopped some youtubers from doing it anyway.
Boom. When pierced, cut or bitten, the reheated boiled egg explodes like a firecracker. The web reports a large number of cases with injured people, but the most recent formal study is linked to a lawsuit. A customer bit a hard-boiled egg in a restaurant, it exploded in his face and he suffered burns, but the claim also reaches his hearing. In an attempt to verify whether the explosion of a reheated boiled egg in the microwave can cause acoustic damage, experts Anthony Nash and Lauren von Blohn from Charles M. Salter Associates used approximately one hundred eggs. Barely a third of them exploded, generating between 86 and 133 decibels at a distance of 30 centimeters.
Now, why do they explode in the first place? In the experiment they discovered an important temperature difference between the water bath and the egg yolk after the explosion. When an egg is cooked, the proteins in the yolk begin to cluster, forming small pockets of water in the process. When heating the hard-boiled egg in a microwave, the proteins in the yolk exceed 100 degrees Celsius... that is, the water crosses its boiling point, and remains under pressure in a state similar to superheating. The rest is a matter of spending the next two hours cleaning the kitchen.
