Aeroeggs

Product Description

Aeroeggs from Aerogelex are unique aerogels made from hard-boiled eggs.  While many people think of space-age blue holographic solids made of silica when they hear the word aerogel, aerogels can actually be made from a wide variety of substances including biopolymers such as those found in eggs.  Aeroeggs are made through supercritical drying, the same process used to make other aerogels, just using boiled eggs instead of silica or polymer gel precursors.  Boiling an egg causes the proteins in the egg to denature and link together to form a gel matrix that contains water in its pores.  Once the inside of the egg has congealed, the shell is removed and the boiled egg inside is soaked in ethanol to replace the water in its pores with a non-polar solvent that is compatible with supercritical drying.  After soaking the egg is put in a high-pressure vessel and the ethanol in its pores is extracted with supercritical carbon dioxide to make an egg aerogel.

Aeroeggs are made from ordinary chicken eggs but are about half the size of a typical hard boiled egg due to contraction of the egg protein network when the water in the egg is replaced with ethanol and carbon dioxide.  Density is approximately 0.6 g/cc making Aeroeggs approximately 50% air by volume.  Aeroeggs absorb 3x their weight in water to irreversibly rehydrate back into regular hard boiled eggs.

Aeroeggs are not only fascinating materials but are also useful for scientific research, medicine, and personal products.  Biocompatible aerogels such as egg aerogels serve as valuable porous scaffolds for drug delivery, time-release fragrances, and tissue replacements.

Aeroeggs come as monolithic egg halves packaged in a transparent decorative openable hanging ornament.  Like Humpty Dumpty, Aeroeggs are fragile and cannot be put back together again once broken, so we suggest you buy a discounted two pack so you can have one to keep and one to experiment with.

Aeroeggs make great gifts for food nerds and science geeks and are great for science project explorations.

Aeroeggs are not edible.  Do not eat.  Although Aeroeggs are made from real eggs and in principle egg aerogels could be eaten if prepared properly, these aerogels are supercritically dried in industrial equipment that processes chemicals and that is not food grade making them not edible.  Seriously don’t eat them, not even rehydrated.  Food grade Aeroeggs available soon.

Made in Germany.  Packaged in USA.