I don’t bother taking the eggs out individually, I just start running cold water into the pan and let it overflow in the sink until all the water in the pan is cold. Let sit a couple minutes and repeat. Using the slotted spoon like you do is fine if you’re just doing an egg or two, but I’m often doing a dozen at a time and don’t have the patience to take them out one by one.
Great God almighty, some of the posts here run gallons of clean, fresh water straight down the drain. Why would anyone use the hot pot they’d just used to *cook *the eggs to cool them, too? Just get a separate bowl full of ice water.
Poached eggs are great. Buy those little silicon cup things from the grocery, coat lightly with oil and crack an egg in. Then float in boiling water and cover until they’re your desired firmness. You can run a knife around the top edge to loosen them and then they’ll plop right out.
Variation on the tea egg theme: Soy sauce eggs. OMNOMNOM.
Eighteen minutes is WAY too long. 12 minutes is about right. More than that, you risk having a sulfur smell to the eggs. Way longer than that and you get both sulfur and greenish gray color.
After the eggs have set for the requisite time, I drain off the hot water, shake the pan vigorously to crack the shells, then run cold water into the pot and add ice on top of it. After everything is cool, I peel the eggs under the water, give them a shake to lose any remaining shell bits and place them on paper towel to dry.
I think this is actually in the Joy Of Cooking. Less than three days old and you can forget about peeling them cleanly.
Alton Brown speaks:
He would have started his eggs in just a bit of cold water adding a teaspoon of salt to help seal any possible cracking. I’m certain that he brought them just to a boil and then he removed them from the heat, put on the lid and then left them alone for exactly 15 minutes.
Then, he would have drained them, maybe banging them around the pan to start the cracking, he would have finished them up in an ice water bath to stop the cooking which would prevent rubbery whites and black tinged yolks. Needless to say, prompt peeling followed.Keeping eggs out for two days at 59F is sufficient to allow easy peeling. Presumably at a higher room temp you’d need less time.
Comprehensive, definitive cite on hard-boiled eggs from an earlier thread: Egg Science and Technology, Fourth Edition - William J Stadelman, Debbie Newkirk, Lynne Newby - Google Books
Who knew? Cooling your hard boiled eggs?
I just whip them out of the boiling water put them straight in an eggcup on my plate.
I’ve never had an issue with reasonably easy peeling without having cooled them down first, apart from being a bit warm on my fingers. What’s the point in cooling them right down? I want to eat my eggs warm.
I prefer soft boiled eggs to hard boiled. Put them in a saucepan, cover them with water, bring to the boil and simmer for 3 minutes. For hard boiled eggs, simmer for 6. I didn’t know you could just leave them in the water off the heat.
Egg cups are useful for soft boiled eggs, but when I was a kid my dad, would turn them out for me, into a cup using a teaspoon. Then add salt and eat with a spoon. Nowadays I sometimes turn them out onto toast. Soft boiled eggs can get messy if you aren’t careful.
Bang the eggs all around on a hard surface to cover the shell with cracks. Roll the egg between your palms to make the whole shell flexible. Then break open the shell under running water, and the shell will come right off, and the water rinses away any sticky bits. You can do this all in about ten seconds per egg, and it doesn’t matter how you cooked them, or how old the eggs are.
Nope. The last 18 eggs I had to peel, I did the exact same method. Which is the method I always use. They did not peel well at all. Not one.
I also do what TriPolar suggests, and it seems to make peeling somewhat easier, but it isn’t a cure-all.
Same here. That’s the method I use, but if the eggs are too fresh, there’s nothing that will get them peeled cleanly.
Here’s a method I like:
In a saucepan with a lid (preferably see-through), put in about a half inch of water. Yes, just a half inch. Insert eggs. Straight out of the fridge is fine. Cover. Bring to boil. As soon as it starts boiling, reduce heat to medium, and cook for four minutes (for jumbo eggs; maybe 3 1/2 for extra large). Turn off heat and let eggs sit for three minutes. Dunk in cool water to stop the cooking. Serve. Perfect, creamy soft yolks and cooked-through egg white every time.
I suspect most of us make hard-boiled eggs for potato salad, tuna salad, deviled eggs or whatever, not a yummy breakfast treat.
I love soft-boiled eggs with warm runny yolks and often eat them off a plate with with bacon, toast and hash browns. They’re a lot like sunny-side up eggs when cooked that way, only without the runny whites and/or over-fried edges that you can sometimes get with fried eggs. Other times I’ll eat them broken up and scooped out onto slices of toast.
It’s difficult to get the shells off of soft-boiled eggs without ripping out chunks of white at the same time, so what I started doing was cracking a nickel-sized or slightly larger hole at the wide end and then peeling off that part of the shell under running water. Then I run a teaspoon down inside the shell and run it around the inside of the egg until I’ve virtually freed it from the more or less intact shell. Then I turn the egg upside down and scoop it out onto a plate or slice of toast. Turning it upside down is necessary because the egg will usually break up and you’ll be scooping out broken pieces of whites and runny yolk at the same time. This sounds worse than it is, It’s a quick process and the eggs are delicious when cooked and eaten this way.
Another way some people eat them is to place them in an egg holder (or shot glass ;)) narrow side up and then crack and remove the shell around the top and eat the egg with a spoon right out of the shell. Narrow-cut pieces of toast dipped into the yolk are good when you eat them this way too.
Oh, yeah! When the eggs are through cooking (about 4.5 to 5 minutes at a light simmer for extra-large or jumbo), I’ll remove them with a slotted spoon to a bowl of water with ice in it and let them sit while the toast is being made. This stops the cooking process and also makes the shell cool enough to handle while you’re scooping out the egg.
Oh, OK. I often hard boil half a dozen eggs and put them in the fridge. My kids eat them when they get home from school. I can’t face cold eggs myself, not plain. In salads they are good.
My favorite trick for fresh eggs is this: I dump the hot water, run cold water into the pan, dump that after a minute, and then swirl the eggs to crack the shells. Then I run cold water over the eggs – this seems to force water between the membrane and the egg, and I often peel them easily after that.
I hard-boil and peel many eggs. Enough that I can do some controlled experiments. Enough that I may write a small treaties on ‘how to’.
The one thing that I can report now it that the biggest controllable difference I can find is the egg. On average, a grade A jumbo egg is easier to peel than any smaller grade A egg of the same brand and age.
Shurly we have someone lurking here who does this full time as a job?