This Kitchen Hack Can Lead to Serious Injuries

Cooking is rewarding, but it can often take more time and effort than we’d like. That’s why we so often utilize hardly-tested food hacks in order to prepare our favorite foods by cutting a few corners. Sometimes, you end up achieving the same tasty result for a fraction of the time and/or cost. In other cases, well, you expose yourself to the kind of danger that an English woman recently experienced.

According to the Mirror, a young woman in the UK recently suffered some pretty serious injuries and was in “total agony” after a recent failed experiment in the kitchen. What led to Bethany Rosser’s dangerous kitchen mishap? Her attempt to make hard-boiled eggs in the microwave, after a recipe said it would be safe to microwave them in water for 6 minutes.

Rather than exploding in the microwave like a normal kitchen experiment gone wrong, Rosser was injured after the shelled eggs exploded, scalding her face and sending her to the hospital. Her eye was swollen shut as a result of the accident, and it’s unclear if there’s been any permanent damage to her vision.

Bethany wasn’t testing the limits of eggs or her microwave, but simply trying to make a quick breakfast. "I was making breakfast before work, and I Googled to see if you could make boiled eggs in the microwave. There are endless websites and YouTube videos which say you can,” she told the Mirror. “On a page, it said that you could microwave the eggs as long as you add salt to the eggs in the water. So of course, I added salt… As I looked to see if the eggs were done, they went bang in my face.”

While Bethany believed that the collective wisdom of the internet told her she was on the right path, experts warn against her hard boiled prep methods. The American Egg Board strongly advises that you “never microwave eggs in shells” because “steam builds up faster than an egg can ‘exhale’ it through its pores.” In addition, the American Egg Board says you should “prick the yolk of an unbeaten egg with the tip of a knife” before microwaving to provide a safe way for steam to escape.

I know I’m not the first person to tell you this, but hopefully this hard-boiled egg microwave disaster serves as another reminder not to trust everything you read online. Because in this case, ending up with egg on your face will surely add injury to insult.

Read more: How to Cook Hard-Boiled Eggs