TikTok is full of useful hacks for life, with its cooking section being particularly useful. These short videos give very concise cooking ‘hacks’ to shortcut complex processes. But, at least for one British woman, things have gone very wrong.
Per The Independent, Shafia Bashir, 39 was following a TikTok guide to make a super-speedy poached egg without having to screw around with heating up a hob and putting vinegar in the water. The recipe said to put boiling water in a mug, crack the egg inside, and microwave it for a few minutes. The results looked good, but when she placed a cold spoon on the egg…
Bashir says that it “erupted like a fountain”, shattering the mug, showering her in sticky molten egg yolk and scalding her face, leaving her in “the most excruciating pain of her life”. Bashir rushed to A&E for treatment and thankfully has now healed. She says:
“I just don’t want anyone else going through that, because it is trending on TikTok…It was the most excruciating pain in my life. It was a terrifying time for me. I was in absolute agony. As soon as I put the cold spoon in, it exploded like a fountain and it scalded me. I put my face under the tap and then had to get my mate to look after my daughter so I could go to A&E. My face has healed now, luckily with no scars. I used Vaseline, Sudocrem, whatever I could get my hands on.”
This isn’t even the first egg-related burns catastrophe to hit TikTok. Also in the U.K., Chantelle Conway was settling down for a nice breakfast and microwaved herself up an egg, only to find herself also seriously burned by the yolk. According to The Independent, she is so traumatized she will “never eat an egg again”.
It’s worth underlining that the vast majority of TikTok cooking hacks won’t leave you with disfiguring facial injuries, though it seems that this specific egg recipe may be dangerous. That said, we’ve been microwaving poached eggs for years and have never had one explode, though our top tip is to put them inside a ramekin with some cling film over the top and wait for them to cool before eating. So be careful out there folks, or the yolk could be on you.