Enough was enough…or should I say en-oeuf already? I haven’t blogged forever. I kept meaning to get back into it but life got in the way and I am still struggling with the time involved with getting a post just right. As other bloggers know, it’s a commitment and I just can’t come to grips that I should just type and play around with pictures when there are sooooo many things to do….
But en-oeuf already… Its Easter Sunday and I thought there was no day better than today to do a post about eggs. Not just any eggs, but our backyard ladies’ eggs. They started laying awhile back and we are still getting double yolkers from 2 of them. The rest of the girls are laying medium-eggs.
But what this post is about is hard boiling them. As a lot of you know, when you get a fresh egg and you decide you HAVE to have a hard boiled one… the shell is a HUGE problem to remove… well not HUGE, but an irritating process and you get little bits of eggshell under your finger nails… it’s that problematic and even somewhat painful.
I follow Serious Eats on Facebook and one day they posted about the only way to peel fresh hard boiled eggs. I was intrigued. Every cook complains about this so I was a bit skeptical. But I am never let down from their posts.
The trick is to have your eggs cold. And your water boiling… rolling boil. Add eggs. Then an immediate turn down to simmer. For soft boiled, 6 minutes and for hard boiled, 11 minutes. Then immediately into an ice bath. Success rate is between 80-90 percent. Every time. I tested it 3 times before I told anyone about it. Then I started making devilled eggs again. DC loves them but with fresh eggs and the peeling pain, I had stopped making them.
I use an egg timer disc for doing eggs but if you don’t have one, just follow the 6 minutes for soft and 11 minutes for hard instructions from above. Gently drop your cold, fresh eggs into the boiling water.
When the eggs are ready, the disc is solid dark red. I forgot to take pictures along the way so you could see the red colour changing from bright red to dark red…. but you can imagine the idea…..the colour goes dark from the outside to the inside.
Then I use the same strainer spoon to gently place the eggs into the ice water. Wait 15 minutes and you have eggs ready to use.
Let the peeling begin! It’s quite remarkable actually… after years of struggling with the shells, they basically just slip off like a non-fresh egg.
I think the theory is that the shock of the cold egg meeting the boiling water and then meeting the shock of the ice at the end, shrinks the egg to produce the gap between the membrane and the shell. Success rate is between 80 and 90 percent, so with the ones that don’t make the devilled egg cut, I just add to the yolks for the filling. Works like a charm.
Happy Easter everyone!
Growing, Cooking, Sharing 