Frying an egg to study heat transport: an engaging and didactic experiment

Using everyday life examples is proven didactically useful for teaching physics, as it presents effective applications of physical laws. Cooking and food, in particular, serve two useful purposes: on one side, they are able to engage students in the study of physics with familiar examples; on the other side, thanks to the wide range of physical phenomena involved, they can help teachers in introducing many new topics and in driving students in the understanding of physics laws. In this paper, we propose an experiment to investigate the cooking process of a fried egg. We show how an egg, a frying pan and a thermal camera can be valuable tools to drive students towards the physical science and how, with a single experiment, it is possible to introduce many different phenomena, from the laws of heat transmission to phase transitions. The experiment can be proposed to high school students as an engaging activity, but it is also a valuable exercise for undergraduate students, as it involves a large amount of non-trivial physics far from a typical textbook approach.