Hard-boiling, soft-boiling or using a trendy sous vide—no matter the approach, cooking a whole egg preserves either the texture of the yolk or the white but rarely both. Now scientists think they have cracked the perfectly cooked egg.

A new study reveals a technique called "periodic cooking" that balances yolk and white to perfection. The only catch? It’s a bit of a time commitment.

The team used computer models of computational fluid dynamics, then tested out the painstaking—yet reportedly delicious—recipe for themselves