Plenty of recipes call for ingredients to be at room temperature — you’ve probably mastered the art of speedily softening butter, but what do you do when your eggs are chilling in the fridge, you’re ready to bake, and your recipe wants them to be room temp?
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Food52 has two solutions, both of which take advantage of the conductive powers of water — since it’s denser than air, it transfers temperature more quickly. (This is also why frozen food thaws much more quickly in a bowl of cold water than sitting out in the air.)
Basically, you want to get your cold eggs into warm water. You can do this with eggs still in their shells — put them in a bowl of warm water for a few minutes — or break the eggs into a bowl and set that in a larger bowl of warm water. Stainless steel, being thinner and having a lower specific heat, will work better for this than glass.
And now I would like to write a thank-you note to my high school chemistry teacher, because we just used the concept of specific heat in real life.
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