Puzzle Description:

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#1: Susan Nagy (susannagy54) on Mar 2, 2019

I was hoping to learn the best way to boil an egg. Many years ago my dad found an article about how to boil eggs so they won't crack (for making Easter eggs). It worked!! We have since lost the article -- probably filed away among the thousands of articles my mom saved over the years -- and now we no longer dye Easter eggs.

That was the trick that I had learned then shared here. Those comments were lost. And I forgot the trick. I'll see if I can find it and post it here.

Oooh, I think I see it. The blue stripe in the pot under the eggs? It's cold water. Soooooooo, the secret to cooking eggs so they never crack is ....

(Dut dut duhhhhhhh....)

Boil them in cold water!!!


What?!

:))))))))))))

So the mystery continues ...

You can boil them in cold water if you really decrease the pressure, but they won't cook.

No, I think it was a steamer basket. Then plunge them in ice water to shock them. I'm still trying to find the exact times.

I've kind of made a study of ways to make hard boiled eggs peel easily. What really works is from Kenji Lopez-Alt of Serious Eats. He says to lower the raw eggs into already-boiling water, so that the surfaces of the eggs heat up before the protein has time to solidify to the shell. Our stove is an induction stove that is really fast, so I usually just put eggs into hot tapwater and then put the stove on maximum heat to boil the water quickly. Anyway, it really works -- the shells come off easily.

https://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2009/10/perfect-boiled-eggs-recipe.html

Okay, I found it.
Put water in a pot below the bottom of a steamer basket and bring to boil. Add eggs, cover, and set timer for 13 minutes. When timer goes off plunge eggs into ice water bath. I use a plastic container with a tight fitting lid. Shake vigorously for 30 seconds. The shells practically fall off of the egg. Yolk and white are both perfect.

Alas, I've had bad results with shaking hard boiled eggs. It's all too easy to end up with a mess of squished egg mixed with a zillion bits of eggshell -- which is not very appetizing. Anyway, if you cook the eggs by any method that gets them hot very quickly, they peel like a dream, so there are lots of ways that work well.

My breakfast for quite a while now has been two hard-boiled eggs and two kinds of fruit, cut up in a bowl with a little mayo. Dunno where the idea came from, but I still look forward to it every morning.

I've found that how well the eggs peel depends on how many eggs, their size, and the pan. I put 8 large in a sauce pan with a tight-fitting lid. The metal is very heavy; today, this would be a professional quality pan, but it was just a regular sauce pan when my mother bought it in the 1940s.(!?)

8 eggs from fridge to pan, tap water--whatever temp comes out, lid, on high (gas stove) for 2+minutes. Turn off heat; do NOT lift lid (keep the heat in), and leave it alone for 12-13 minutes. Then turn on cold water (to avoid shocking the pipes) and slowly pour some water from the pan down the drain. Keep the tap water running; add cold water to pan, pause, pour; add, pause, pour; acoupla more times. Then let the eggs cool a bit, then put 'em in the fridge.

They usually peel just fine. But I may try the Serious Eats method.

All my life I just gently crack the egg, then gently roll it around, and the shell peels right off in seconds. A quick rinse of water and they're perfect.

Found to have a unique solution by valerie.

Found to be solvable with moderate lookahead by valerie.

What my mother taught me: cover eggs in pot with cold water, put lid on; use high heat until water boils; turn off heat, let sit fifteen minutes; pour out water, cover with cold water. If you boil them too hard, the yolks acquire a green layer; this method prevents that, and the cold water at the end helps the shells loosen from the whites.

Susan -- That's approximately what I was taught, too. But when I do it that way, the shells stick to the eggs much more than when I use Kenji Lopez-Alt's method, so I've switched.

I used this technique tonight and the eggs were perfect.

Brian: Glad it worked, but I'm not sure which technique you used?

My comment #7 describes how to perfectly hard cook (and peel) an egg.

Boiling the eggs was easy. Putting on the lid was the hard part.

When there's only black left on the top,
Edge Logic 2 c1 = r4 white
EL 2 c13 = r4 w
Line Logic
EL 3 r1 places it
LL to finish

Hm. I wonder if shaking the eggs in a plastic container helps prevent the "mixture of mashed eggs and broken eggshells" that I've gotten by shaking the eggs in a metal pot. A plastic container would be gentler. Cool!

Hm. This morning I re-tried the "shake freshly cooked hardboiled eggs in their shells in a container" method, this time using a plastic container. And I had mixed results.

Out of seven eggs, two peeled themselves nicely, one peeled but also broke into pieces, one peeled but had major fault lines going through its core, one had a totally unbroken shell, and two had cracked-up shells that slipped right off, though leaving one kind of pockmarked and covered in tiny bits of "eggshell rubble."

An interesting detail: I used up a container of eggs and started a new one, so there were five eggs from one brand and two from another brand, organic "Happy Eggs" -- which I've noticed have very orange-colored yolks for this time of year (which I've read is caused by the farmer including marigold petals in the chickens' feed). Anyway, both of the eggs that broke had bright orange yolks, so I think they must have been the two "Happy Eggs." So I am thinking that some brands of eggs may, on average, be more sturdy than others. So if each of us is getting different results, it could be because we are all using different brands of eggs and not just because of our different cooking techniques.

Don't forget that older eggs peel easier than new ones, as well.

Yup. One of my kids (adults? He's 23) put away the eggs from our most recent load of groceries, and I'm not sure whether he kept them in first-in-first-out order or if the Happy Eggs container was freshly purchased. He would normally keep first-in-first-out order -- we are pretty carefully geeky about these things -- but I haven't yet found him awake to ask him about it.

I've found my geeky boy keeps his own hours. Sigh. I thought he'd grow out of this, but he's now 33 and he hasn't yet. If he has a class or a job that requires it, he adjusts, but left to his own devices, he's a night owl. He's getting married this summer, so as long as he and his fiance are cool with this, I don't worry about it anymore. I'm something of a night owl myself (she admits sheepishly lol).

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