A few weeks ago a friend of mine sent me a message about something she’d seen on Pinterest: how to make a naked egg.
I thought it would be a fun project, but I’ll admit that mostly…I just wanted to take pictures.
First we soaked the eggs in vinegar and watched the bubbles for a while.
It’s fun because the bubbles occasionally make the egg spin.
You’ll note that we started with three, but ended up with two.
User error. (My bad.)
After a day or so, I rinsed them off and put them in fresh vinegar.
If she shell wipes off in your hand the first time, a second soaking may not be necessary.
I would go into what we talked about, but I pretty much just expounded on what he said in the video.
I will say that it’s fairly squishy and bouncy at this point, but one over-zealous bounce and you’ll have a big mess!
After I’d taken 7,000 pictures, we soaked one egg in corn syrup.
We only had dark syrup, so ours looks even more disgusting!
We soaked the other in a water-blue food coloring mix.
We talked a little about diffusion and osmosis.
(Don’t be impressed…I couldn’t remember too much about those, so I watched this refresher.)
The one in corn syrup shriveled up and – get this – the yolk got hard.
It was super gross.
The other one became swollen and very, very blue.
Earlier (when it was still just a plain ol’ nekkid egg) I let the children do a few squeeze tests.
But once it was full of blue? Not so much.
Since I’d forgotten to take a squishy picture though, I smooshed it a few times myself.
We wanted to prove that the colored water was actually going into the egg and not coloring the outside like at Easter.
Our hypothesis was that if it was just coloring the membrane, then the yolk would still be yellow.
BUT if the food coloring was actually going into the egg, it would make the yolk look green.
Guess what?
We were right.
So cool! Also? I’m sending my kid to school at your house in a couple of years!
So cool! And gross! Science is cool and gross and makes for good pictures!
So THAT’S how they make green eggs and ham….