How to Cook a Soft-Boiled Egg Optimally: A Laplace-Transform Solution of a Two-Domain Heat Equation

Abstract

We study the problem of cooking the yolk and albumen of a hen's egg to their respective optimal temperatures of $T_Y^* = 65^\circ$C and $T_W^* = 85^\circ$C, subject to the requirement that neither temperature ever exceed its target at any time during cooking, since temporary overshoot still overcooks the egg even if the final reading is correct. We model the egg as a two-domain sphere with distinct thermal diffusivities, and take the Laplace transform of the heat equation in each domain, reducing the problem to a $3 \times 3$ linear system in the transform variable $s$ with hyperbolic-trigonometric solutions. The resulting transform is inverted numerically via Talbot's method and validated against a finite-difference solver. A single boiling phase cannot satisfy the no-overshoot requirement: the thin outer albumen heats far faster than the insulated yolk and necessarily overshoots $T_W^*$ before the yolk approaches $T_Y^*$. We show that a three-phase protocol resolves this: a sous-vide pre-soak at exactly $65^\circ$C (which cannot overshoot since the bath temperature equals the target), a short boil to bring the albumen toward $T_W^*$, and an ice-water bath that arrests the albumen's residual overshoot while residual heat continues raising the yolk to its target. Optimizing the phase durations gives $17.26$ minutes of sous-vide, $66$ seconds of boiling, and an ice bath, achieving both targets at $T^* \approx 20.67$ minutes with neither constraint violated at any time. This compares favorably with the periodic protocol of Di Lorenzo et al. (2025), which requires 32 minutes and misses both targets substantially.