Boiling an egg – with chemistry!

How to boil an egg using calcium oxide

Watch out – here comes an ex­treme­ly hot ex­per­i­ment!

Safe­ty pre­cau­tions

Warn­ing! All ex­per­i­ments por­trayed in this video are per­formed by pro­fes­sion­als. Do not at­tempt.

Reagents and equip­ment

  • egg;
  • heat-re­sis­tant bowl;
  • cal­ci­um ox­ide;
  • wa­ter.

Step-by-step in­struc­tions

Pour some cal­ci­um ox­ide into a heat-re­sis­tant bowl. Place an egg on top and press it slight­ly into the pow­der. Fill the bowl with wa­ter. The mix­ture quick­ly heats up and boils. When the re­ac­tion stops and the mix­ture cools down, re­trieve the egg and rinse it with wa­ter. Peel and cut the egg — it’s now per­fect­ly hard-boiled! Do not eat eggs pre­pared with this method; they may con­tain chem­i­cals.

Pro­cess­ de­scrip­tion

The for­ma­tion of new chem­i­cal bonds some­times re­leas­es a large amount of en­er­gy in the form of heat and oc­ca­sion­al­ly light. Re­ac­tions that re­lease heat into the sur­round­ing en­vi­ron­ment are called exother­mic re­ac­tions. Wa­ter re­acts with cal­ci­um ox­ide to form cal­ci­um hy­drox­ide.

СаО + Н₂О = Са(ОН)₂ + Q

Dur­ing this re­ac­tion, so much heat is re­leased that the liq­uid boils and the egg is cooked.

This ex­per­i­ment is dan­ger­ous. But you can find many more cool, safe ex­per­i­ments in the MEL Chem­istry sub­scrip­tion!

Try it