Silly Egg-speriment....

There's an old Sesame Street song about the weather that I used to sing as a kid called "¡Hace Calor!" (translation: "It Sure is Hot!"--and it's an adorable video, by the way). I loved it primarily because of the fun Spanish words, but also because it was particularly apt for a kid growing up in Vegas:

Hace calor, mucho calor. Could fry an egg on the cement, it's so caliente!

Naturally, what's the one thing I've always wanted to do through my whole childhood but was never allowed to try? You guessed it, probably because you've always wanted to try it too: fry an egg on the cement.

Now, this is a baking blog. And obviously I'm not going to eat an egg that's been baked on the ground. But I owe this blog entry to one of my coworkers, who suggested the intriguing experiment of frying an egg outside in Vegas' record-breaking 110 degree weather...on a baking sheet.

Why not?

Friday's high was about the same as any other day this week, so on Friday morning I set out with a mission: wait for the sun to be dead center in the sky at 12:00 noon, warm my baking pan outside, and crack an egg right on top of it. If I was lucky, I might just have fried eggs for lunch.

Well, business of the day distracted me at noon, and so I didn’t get a chance to "egg-speriment" until after 3:00, which actually turned out to be a hotter temperature than the temperature at noon (106 instead of 99). I grabbed my equipment—one baking pan, one spatula, one egg—and set out into the backyard.

Step 1: I sprayed the pan with nonstick cooking spray and let it sit out in the heat for about 15 minutes to warm up. Not wanting to rest it directly on the ground (you know, to avoid bugs and such), I set it on a lawn chair by our pool.

Step 2: I cracked my egg into the pan. And waited. After five minutes it looked...about the same.

No sizzling. No turning white. No bubbling up eventually to be flipped over. Maybe I didn't leave it outside long enough. Maybe the experiment would be better for 120 degree weather rather than 106. Still, the results were enough to lead me to the less interesting but probably most accurate conclusion: Vegas weather is not hot enough to fry an egg outside. We have no reason to complain. ;)

Not to waste an egg, however, I brought the baking pan inside, slid it into a buttered frying pan, and cooked it on the stove, where it quickly molded itself into an unexpected heart shape, reminding us all that you can love where you live and look on the bright side even in 106 degree weather. At least we're not (literally) baking outside.