It seems that every year I see some stupid local weatherman on TV trying to fry an egg on the pavement during hot weather, and of course it never works. Is it impossible to fry an egg on the pavement? What conditions would be necessary for success? If it IS impossible, then what started this silly idea in the first place?
I’ve seen it done on a car roof in hot weather; metal gets hotter in the sun than concrete, probably something to do with conductivity and so on, but I’ll leave the explanations to the physics people.
I haven’t seen it done on a sidewalk, but I saw a WWII newsreel showing a German soldier in North Africa frying an egg on a Panzer.
A bit of hyperbole perhaps? Like “raining cats and dogs” or “faster than greased lightning”?
See Opal’s post here.
your link leads nowhere.
I remember reading that the temperature had to be something like 140 degrees fahrenheit to fry an egg. But from a quick websearch I get a variety of answers.
105 degrees: http://www.dmagazine.com/july00/pulse07003.shtml (see sidebar at right)
300 degrees: http://www.georgiaeggs.org/eggtrivia.html
145 degrees: http://www.eng.iastate.edu/explorer/eggs/link6.htm
And here’s a site for a town that hold a egg frying contest:
http://www.whatsgoingon.com/coolest.cgi/place/20010624/
Mr. Duality, Jeff’s link worked fine for me.
It’s easy to fry and egg on the sidewalk. Simply light a fire on the sidewalk of your choice, let it burn for long enough to heat up the concrete. Sweep away the fire (if you want to eat the egg be really thorough with this part) add one egg and watch that sucker fry!
As a kid growing up in Phoenix, my friends and I conducted a number of amateur experiments in this vein. IIRC, our official results were:
Sidewalk: no cooking detectable on repeated attempts
Pavement: ditto
Manhole cover: the “white” of the egg eventually changed from clear to kind of cloudy and translucent (but we only tried this once, so we never determined if it was a fluke or not)
Our conclusion was that it’s generally impossible to cook an egg on the sidewalk/street, even if you’re in the desert and it’s 112 outside. And also that standing around in bare feet while watching such attempts is a really dumb thing to do.
Isn’t one of the ways to tell if the pan is hot enough is to splash a little water on the pan and see it dances around on the pan because it is boiling away so quickly it kind resting on steam. To my mind this means to FRY and egg the sidewalk has to be quite a bit above 212F. COOKING and egg is probably much lower but I don’t know. I am sure that the eggs are not 212F all the way through.
I don’t know about concrete either, but I’ve seen it done on a tennis court at the Australian Open. It was seriously hot (43C IIRC) and the players were standing in puddles between points. The egg turned white on contact with the surface.
When I was about 8 years old, my friends and I tried this. Our street had been newly paved with asphalt, and it sure burned our feet, so why not an egg? We ended up with a big slimy mess.
Later that summer, we also tried sitting on the street in our bathing suits as long as we could, then rushing to the water filled wagon, in order to see steam rise, just like in the cartoons. That didn’t work either.
The very next year, the family went out to California for vacation. At one stop, my mom pointed out a roadrunner. I excitedly looked around for a 6 foot tall purple bird tearing up the road and saying “beep beep”. I was rather disapointed when I finally saw the small, nondescript thing walking around in the dust.
I’ve seen half-successful attempts to fry eggs on manhole covers too, on Tampa-St. Pete TV stations when I lived there.
But yesterday I saw for the first time someone baking cookies on the dashboard of a car left in the sun, windows up, to demonstrate the danger of leaving kids/pets/rental videos in the car on a hot sunny day.
They were holding up some sort of electronic thermometer, but the camerman completely failed in capturing it’s display, and I didn’t hear the anchorperson report the actual temperature in the car. Them cookies looked good, though!