Ever wonder what happens when you forget about an egg boiling on the stove?

IT AIN'T PRETTY.

I started the egg, then went upstairs to do "a few things" which of course ended up taking like 30 minutes, so when I went down, I could smell the plastic of the pot handle melting.  I went over there and of course all the water was gone, part of the handle seemed to be burning a bit, so I turned off the heat, and cleverly tried blowing on the burning plastic to blow it out.

Well, the cool air also hit the egg, which FREAKING EXPLODED IN MY FACE.

I Guess I'm lucky all I got was a tiny mild burn next to my eye.  It smarts a bit though.  There were bits of egg all over my hair, clothes and all over the kitchen.

Please take care with the pots on the stove.  I've learned my lesson!

(I hope)

you are very lucky you escaped with only minor burns and a mess...  I've seen this happen (well, the egg explode) -- it's not pretty.

never leave the burners on "hi" or "med" unless you will be near the kitchen also works pretty well.

glad to hear you're ok and that you've learned something (I hope )

:/

that's awful!

glad you escaped with only a minor injury

have any aloe for that burn?

Original Post by nomoreexcuses:

:/

that's awful!

glad you escaped with only a minor injury

have any aloe for that burn?

Yeah, some aloe gel anyway.  Putting a cool pack on it now.

Im boiling another egg now (knock wood)

I know a watched pot never boils... but watch this one anyway!  Really glad you're ok since it could have been a lot more serious.

I bet that really hurt, but the visual is pretty funny ;)  Thanks for the advanced warning!

I'm sorry, but the visual in my head makes me want to giggle.  Please say you're all spiffy and okay so I can snort, finally.

Original Post by cellulitedelight:

I'm sorry, but the visual in my head makes me want to giggle.  Please say you're all spiffy and okay so I can snort, finally.

Snort away CD.  An exploding egg is a ridiculous visual.  Annoying to clean up from the walls, cabinets, floor and myself though...

Scary, but a funny visual.  I have bad enough luck with hurting myself that I would have blown up the entire building and died if this happened to me.  But luckily, I don't like hard boiled eggs...

Glad you escaped (nearly) unscathed.

Original Post by udokier:

Original Post by cellulitedelight:

I'm sorry, but the visual in my head makes me want to giggle.  Please say you're all spiffy and okay so I can snort, finally.

Snort away CD.  An exploding egg is a ridiculous visual.  Annoying to clean up from the walls, cabinets, floor and myself though...

Reminds me of the scene from Tropic Thunder where the movie director steps on the 30 year old landmine... BOOM, guts everywhere... so unexpected and random (and unrealistic) that it was hilarious.

Original Post by udokier:

Original Post by cellulitedelight:

I'm sorry, but the visual in my head makes me want to giggle.  Please say you're all spiffy and okay so I can snort, finally.

Snort away CD.  An exploding egg is a ridiculous visual.  Annoying to clean up from the walls, cabinets, floor and myself though...

 I also giggled!  Sorry though, hope not too painful.  Ive boiled a pot to nothing as well.  Now I set the timer as a reminder as Im very forgetful!

I used to live with someone who had a South American Jay bird. He was beautiful. He loved boiled eggs and would eat the shell as well. My roommate would cook him eggs several times a week. I've seen more than a few of them blown up all over the kitchen. She never had any explode on her though. What a mess! It's hard to believe that one egg can literally explode over an entire kitchen.

I did this before, except it was three eggs and I left it burning to go up to the third floor to do home work.

2 hrs later I started to smell burning hair and flesh (what I would assume it would smell like together). I went down stairs and there was pieces of egg all over the kitchen where 1 or 2 exploded. I mean everywhere, the ceiling, behind the trash can...

The half of the 1 that was left in the pan was bubbling in a tiny bit of black liquid. The smell lasted for days. My room-mates weren’t so happy to come home to a smell like that and even less thrilled that I left something burning like that.

Sucks.

Holy crap...i'm glad you posted this so I'll know to watch myself when boiling eggs...i (and my husband) tend to forget while cooking things...needed a tea kettle that whistles or i'd forget about it all the time. 

This reminds me of a funny story (not to the person it happened to, of course).  My friend's brother had a weird but expensive type of beer in a glass bottle with a screw on lid.  He only drank a little and gave it to my friend to drink the rest of some other time since it had cost so much.  She put it in the back of the fridge with the lid on tight and forgot about it.  A month or two later my sister was visiting this girl.  When they left the kitchen to sit in the living room, they heard a huge explosion.  Food and milk and glass were splattered everywhere in the kitchen.  I guess the beer had been building up some kind of gas inside the closed bottle and eventually exploded.  So if anyone ever buys a beer with a twist on cap and decides to only drink a little and put the cap back on, do NOT forget it's in the fridge because it can definitely injure someone.  Luckily my sister and friend were not in the kitchen when this happened.

I've never seen an egg explode before, so what's going through my head is fascinating.  My dad was boiling eggs for dinner once when I was small and he was stuck home alone with me.  We both forgot about them and watched Jeopardy.  By the end of Jeopardy we finally smelled the burning eggs.

They were brown, but not exploding.  I'm so jealous now.

You people are sick, laughing at a man covered with exploding egg. Standing there, bits of egg clinging to face and hair and clothes, likely looking as dumbfounded as Wile E Coyote in the aftermath of a TNT incident. Udo, did you hear "wah wah wahh" in the background afterwards?

EDIT: PS Glad you are ok :) I will take heed and never leave a boiling egg unattended.

Original Post by cellulitedelight:

They were brown, but not exploding.  I'm so jealous now.

 An injury free, and limited mess clean up way of witnessing an exploding egg:  put it in the microwave on high for 5 minutes.  It's a great stress reliever after 6 hours of studying for calculus and material mechanics finals.  Downright hilarious if you have a couple of hurricanes in you.  If you're a true geek, you can come up with charts tracking burst time, power settings, and egg sizes and estimating a correlation coeffecient.

Reportedly, that is.  It's not like I would know or anything.

on edit: Disclaimer:  Anyone ignoring the microwave manufacturer's use guidlines/safety warnings still does so at their own risk.

Udokier, I'm glad you're okay!  I hope the clean up didn't take too long. 

Yowza!  Glad you came out of it okay!

One very easy and safe way to boil eggs (which I learned from Alton Brown) is to put them in an electric tea kettle and then cover them with water (I make sure they're fully submerged plus give them an extra 0.5 cm or so).  The kettle turns itself off after the water boils.  And the eggs are perfectly cooked about 15 minutes after you started.

hmm... a way to avoid this happening again is just cracking an egg into a glass bowl and microwaving it (30 seconds for soft boiled, probably 45 for hardboiled).

i love making softboiled eggs this way and dipping toast in it, it's delish.

but that way you can skip the whole boiling process, and have same caloric value!

another alternative is to bring the water to full rolling boil and then turn it off. let the egg(s) sit in the water for 15 minutes.

You can't really consider us sick for laughing when A) you describe it in an even more hilarious manner and B) he said he's fine and we're free to giggle.