How do companies which produce commercial products that need hard boiled eggs (for example, egg salad) peel the eggs? Is there some type of mechanical egg peeler? I can’t imagine in this day and age that people would still have to peel eggs by hand.
–SMM
I saw a neat piece about this kind of thing, at least ten years ago on some magazine show like Dateline… (really bad cite.) In the case I saw, the goal was to make sliced hard boiled eggs, as for ‘decoration’ on salads or just to garnish plates or whatever.
It was a neat process. They had a machine that picked up a dozen or more eggs at once, using little suction arms, and the eggs were sliced open and the contents fell (a short distance) into a trough which led to further machines. The yolks were separated, whirled, then cooked (in casings? I don’t remember that detail) to create long ‘tubes’ of yolks. Those went into plastic casings the diameter of eggs and the egg whites poured in around them, and those were then cooked to set the white.
The casings were peeling off and the product simply sliced, creating endless egg slices, each with a perfect yolk/white ration. That is, none of those ‘end’ slices that had a tiny or no amount of yolk.
Very nifty.
Wow, I never would have guessed that the shell is removed first, before cooking.
Those same “egg tubes” are used by fast food restaurants to make their breakfast sandwiches, too.
Really? Which fast food places do that? (I ask because McD’s doesn’t, and I thought they defined pretty much the lower bound)
StarvingButStrong’s procedure is interesting, but is clearly not used by everyone. Many convenience stores in my area sell packages of two already-peeled hard-boiled eggs. (It’s a great and nutritious quick meal, and priced at 99c-$1.29, it is a lot cheaper than junk food too!) Sorry I’ve forgotten the brand name, but it’s from somewhere in the midwest, possibly Minnesota. (7-Eleven also sells hardboiled eggs in packs of two, but they have the shells still on. I can’t imagine how their customers peel them.)
“And two hard boiled eggs.”
You can buy six hard-boiled eggs in a package made by Egglunds at most grocery stores, at least at Publix. Since I see coupons for them in the Sunday paper, I assume they are readily available. They are priced, also, around 50 cents each.
This is one of the automation companies that makes such equipment. You can select any given part of the process to see more detail.
The cafe at my work always has hard boiled eggs for the salads they make. They have a big bowl of them. They grab one and put in a slicer, then on the salad. One day I saw them fill the bowl… from a big bag that they cut open full of already pealed hard boiled eggs. So there is obviously some comercial process for doing so, but I have no idea what it is. Probably it is done at the same factory where they peal all those baby carrots you see in packages at the store as well.
Actually, I buy twelve packs of those from the grocery store for use in my breakfasts, so they’re available to normal consumers as well. In my local supermarkets, they’re in hard packs next to the cartons of artificial eggs.