Can you really 'fry an egg on the sidewalk'?
Newspapers used to test the idea during heat waves
I started out in journalism when newspapers were still fun. By “fun” I mean: In a heat wave, you could count on an enterprising city editor or two to send a reporter out see if what people were saying was true: “You could fry an egg on the sidewalk.”
The cliché may have been as old as poured concrete, but it could still made you smile. The result was such a crowd-pleaser, a photo of it often ended up on page one.
That was before hedge funds and private equity were draining the life out of newspapers they couldn’t kill outright. Not many editors still have the luxury of putting a reporter on a story about half-cooked eggs: They’re scrambling to cover fire-alarm fires and accountants cooking the books at city hall.
But TV stations like KPNX in Phoenix have kept the tradition alive. And podcaster Dave Hales showed on YouTube, that yes, you can fry an egg on the sidewalk. (It works best if you place the egg in a pan, not on the asphalt.) A yolk solidifies at 149°–158° F, and it’s safe to eat when its internal temperature reaches 160°, the U.S. Department of Agriculture says.
As far as I can tell, no reporter has cracked an egg on a sidewalk during the heat wave here in South Alabama, a blast furnace on Mobile Bay. But I can dream of those glory days of enterprise reporting, can’t I? Woodward and Bernstein were never like this.
I used to live in Spain and found that Sevilla (Seville) is the hottest city in Europe. It's located in the Guadalquivir Valley known as the frying pan of Europe for the reasons you give. Avoid in Summer - the ANNUAL average daytime temperature is 25C / 78F.
This made me hungry!