I came here to say something similar. My late, great gramma-in-law had hundreds of chickens. Gramma always said fresh eggs were harder to peel. However, if we were at my home peeling my store-bought eggs and they were hard to peel, she’d say, “Huh. Must be really fresh.” You can see the error in logic.
Years later, through no fault of my own, I had 13 hens and a rooster. The eggs laid that same day were all but impossible to peel, but the eggs that were 5 or 6 days old were only slightly easierl. I never had eggs long enough to try them at a month, buyt given my history with store-bought eggs, I can’t imagine I’d have had better luck.
But here’s my question: What is it ABOUT fresh eggs that makes them harder to peel?
This has come up several times on these threads. As far as I’m concerned, if easily paled eggs and perfectly cooked eggs with very little fuss, this is the superior way:
I have one. it works EVERY SINGLE TIME. You set it and forget it. No guessing, no measuring, no monitoring. You can set it for hard, medium or soft boiled. I’m tempted to post a video - the shells literally fall off. It doesn’t matter if they are fresh or old, room temperature or cold (I’ve tested). For perfect eggs, this is the way.
And they are small and cheap. I use mine on a weekly basis and have for the last 3 years.
When we had chickens we had a carton we kept in the refrigerator to age them for boiling purposes. After a week or so it did seem easier to peel them but it might have been confirmation bias.
The pH of the albumen (egg white) affects the ability to easily peel eggs. When an egg is laid, the albumen has a neutral pH (around 7.4). As an egg ages, the pH of the albumen increases to approximately 9. The increase in pH reduces the attraction of the outer (thin) albumen to the inner shell membrane allowing for easier peeling of the hard cooked egg. For this reason, older eggs make better candidates for hard cooking.
I use this Instant Pot recipe, then stick them in the fridge for at least an hour to get fully cold. Running water over them during peeling helps too. It’s not quite 100%, but it’s a lot better than anything else I’ve tried.
Not exactly. We discovered the day after we moved into a house we’d bought that the owners had left chickens in the coop. Nobody wanted them, so there they were. I must confess that while I love animals, I don’t find chickens endearing, at least not the ones we had.
crowmanyclouds, thanks for the info on the science behind eggs and shells. I get it now.
I thought I had found the answer to this problem but may be it only works for the eggs I buy?
Basically what I do is to let them boil for about 15 minutes more than the usual 10. That’s it.
Since I started doing that 99% of the eggs I prepare are easy to peel.
Wow, lots of helpful (if sometimes contradictory) advice – thank you all! It really sounds like those egg steamer contraptions are the best answer so far, but they run into another of my quirks: NO UNITASKERS.
My kitchen had become impossibly cluttered over the years with all sorts of gadgets and devices, so many that they made it way too difficult to do the ordinary kitchen stuff – like find enough open counter space to put out a cutting board! – and over a couple of years I did repeated purges, eliminating things that 1) did only one thing that 2) wasn’t done at least on a weekly basis and 3) couldn’t be done at least adequately with some more general purpose item I already own.
I think my NO unitasker rule is going to beat out my passion for perfect eggs. And I don’t have a pressure cooker, either, haven’t found myself drawn to one yet, but maybe…
Otherwise, it sounds like my process fits with a whole lot of ‘best method’ suggestions already, but I will definitely try using an ice bath rather than just cold tap water, and see if that works better.
Oh, and I told my husband about my posting this thread and all your ideas and discussion, and he gave me this LOOK and then suggested his own solution: He has vowed to immediately consume any ‘ugly’ peeled eggs I produce so I don’t have to look at them any longer. My hero!
If you buy your eggs in a supermarket, they’ve been aged for you. We stopped trying to hardboil freshly laid eggs from our hens. They are definitely more difficult to peel.
I have to confess that I’m a bit mystified by the whole topic. Maybe I’m the anomaly, but I’ve never really had any issue in peeling eggs at all. I do it the way my mother did: boil them, run some cold water into the pot, let them sit for a few minutes, roll them on the counter, and then peel them under running water. In 60+ years, I’ve had MAYBE a couple eggs that gave me problems, but this works 99% of the time for me.
I do the same thing when I take boiled eggs to lunch. I just don’t roll them until I’m ready to eat them. I have had some odd looks peeling eggs at the water fountain.
Related question: At our company cafeteria, the salad bar gets reloaded with like ~50 perfectly boiled and peeled eggs regularly. How do they do it? Is there some automated way to do the peeling?
You can buy pre-peeled eggs at the grocery store. They probably use a gadget like this.
One of my favorite YouTubers actually has a smaller model that he used for quail eggs, when they were raising those. ETA: He debuts the machine at about the 21-minute mark. (They had some problems with their flock, and “got rid of” it.)
