76 eggs
a smooth, continuous mass, the yolk sets
into a crumbly mass of separate particles.
The intact yolk turns out to consist of
spherical compartments about a tenth of a
millimeter across, each contained within a
flexible membrane, and so tightly packed
that they’re distorted into flat-sided shapes
(much like the oil droplets that egg yolk
stabilizes in mayonnaise; see p. 626). When
a yolk is cooked intact, these spheres
harden into individual particles and give
the yolk its characteristic crumbly texture.
But break the yolk out before you cook it
so that the spheres can move freely, and it
becomes less granular.
What’s inside these large yolk spheres?
Though we think of the yolk as rich and
fatty, in fact its chambers are filled mostly
with water. Floating in that water are sub-
spheres about one hundredth the size of
the spheres. The subspheres are too small to
see with the naked eye or to be broken up
by a kitchen beating. But they can be seen
indirectly, and disrupted chemically. Yolk is
cloudy because these subspheres are large
enough to deflect light and prevent it from
passing through the yolk directly. Add a
pinch of salt to a yolk (as you do when
making mayonnaise) and you’ll see the yolk
An egg yolk granule as
seen through the electron
microscope. It has fallen
apart after immersion in
a salt solution, and is an
intricate assembly of pro-
teins, fats, phospholipids,
and cholesterol.
become simultaneously clearer and thicker.
Salt breaks apart the light-deflecting sub-
spheres into components that are too small
to deflect light—and so the yolk clears up.
And what do the subspheres contain? A
mixture similar to the liquid that surrounds
them in the spheres. First, water. Dissolved
in the water, proteins: hen blood proteins
outside the subspheres; inside, phospho-
rus-rich proteins that bind up most of the
egg’s iron supply. And suspended in the
water, subsubspheres about 40 times
smaller than the subspheres, some of which
turn out to be familiar from the human
body. The subsubspheres are aggregates of
four different kinds of molecules: a core
of fat surrounded by a protective shell of
protein, cholesterol, and phospholipid, a
hybrid fat-water mediator which in the egg
is mainly lecithin. Most of these subsub-
spheres are “low-density lipoproteins,” or
LDLs—essentially the same particles that
we keep track of in our own blood to mon-
itor our cholesterol levels.
Stand back from all these spheres within
spheres and the picture becomes less dizzy-
ing. The yolk is a bag of water that contains
free-floating proteins and protein-fat-
cholesterol-lecithin aggregates—and these