Today we hard boiled some FRESH eggs from our chickens - fresh as in laid today. In the past peeling hard boiled fresh eggs has been a pain so we looked up some tricks to make them easier to peel. We saw a lot of comments about two solutions - adding vinegar to the water, and adding salt to the water while boiling. So we figured, we’ll do both.
When I checked to see if the water with the eggs had come to a boil I noticed some little brown specks floating in the water. I thought it was odd and asked my wife if the pot had been clean to begin with. We figured since vinegar is a good cleaner, perhaps it dissolved some cooking oils that regular washing hadn’t been able to remove from the pot.
These are brown eggs. And as I ran cold water over them after they were cooked, I noticed they looked odd and started rubbing them with my thumb AND THE BROWN CAME OFF! IT CAME COMPLETELY OFF. I rubbed some more and before long I had a white egg shell.
Calcium carbonate, the main constituent of eggshells, is soluble in vinegar. You weren’t using full strength vinegar (which would remove the shell entirely, leaving a naked egg in its membrane), but any drop in pH will attack the shell.
It takes 20 hours for a chicken to create an eggshell, but the majority of the pigment is deposited during the last few hours, in the protein-rich layer called the cuticle. The eggshell contains traces of pigment, but it’s negligible compared to the cuticle.
I would like to know if it helped when you peeled the eggs. We have chickens too, and it’s a pain in the proverbial trying to peel too-fresh eggs: it seems that they have to be AT LEAST a week old before that membrane slips away easily.
Yeah, true, but it always seems to be the way that the only eggs I have available when called upon to make kam’s Famous Potato Salad are bloody fresh eggs.
So if anyone can come up with a way to get the bloody fresh eggs to peel easily, I want to know about it.
I got this Google Books link from this earlier thread. Bottom line: the easy way is to take them out of your refrigerator for a day or two. This raises the pH of the egg (more basic).
The book also refers to a table that is unfortunately not in the preview which indicates holding the eggs at a high temperature for a relatively short period eases peeling.
There is a video where someone claims adding baking soda to the water makes the eggs easy to peel. However, he did not have a control egg, so that’s inconclusive.
Well, yes it does make them easier to peel. We tend to eat / sell / give away our eggs pretty quickly. And I practice a strict inventory rotation, so usually the eggs in our fridge are pretty new. And after a bout of seeing some relatives out of town, we had exhausted our inventory. So when we decided we wanted some boiled eggs, all I had was that day’s eggs. That’s what prompted us to combine the methods.
We have had good luck just adding salt to the water. Then we cool them not just in cold water, but in an ice water bath. Doing those two things made our fresh eggs peel almost as good as store bought eggs, which I’ve heard can be as much as six weeks old when they hit the grocer’s shelf.
I posted this question on a poultry board as well and got the same answer. Interestingly enough, another poster there shared this; the blue shelled eggs that the Araucana breed of chickens lay are blue through and through the shell. So I guess in that case, the color comes from some process that breed uses processing the calcium for the shell. Aren’t robin eggs blue shelled too?
Also you need old eggs for baking. I recently stayed with friends who keep chickens, and everything I tried to bake for them (my friends, not the chickens) failed. Turns out I would have been better with supermarket eggs.
Hmmm, I haven’t noticed this. But of course I’m not much of a baker, usually just adding the required egg(s) to a mix. Is there some specific area where the fresh eggs fail?
I think in young eggs the protein molecules haven’t completely [whatever it is they do]. The result was that cakes etc. were collapsing because the internal structure wasn’t holding up after the cake rose. When I retried the recipes with the same equipment and all the same ingredients but using supermarket eggs, they worked fine.
