why boiled egg shells can sometimes be easy to peel and other times stick and take chunks of egg with them
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Too many cooks in the kitchen already, but hear me out:
Steam the eggs for 13 minutes. Perfectly hard boiled, and no fuss no muss peeling. Even after a week in the fridge.
I learned it from americas test kitchen.
I used to steam my eggs, and then did the ice bath. I still had the same “shell stuck to the eggs” problems with peeling a lot of the time. I’ve tried steaming, starting on cold water, new and old eggs, poking a hole in one side with a pin, and vinegar in the water. Nothing seemed to matter much. I even tried baking them in a muffin tin. Then I tried j. Kenji’s Lopez-Alt’s method, of adding the eggs to boiling water and then just letting them air cool back in the carton. It’s been the best results I’ve had.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hb0Elaa6gxY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hb0Elaa6gxY)
Steaming them is the ONLY way, I took fresh eggs from my farmer friend, older eggs that had been in the fridge, and fresh eggs from the store. Put your steamer basket in the pot, bring to a boil, put the eggs in the basket, cover and let steam for 12-13 minutes (full steam) then put them immediately in an ice bath. Couldn’t tell the difference as they all peeled perfectly!
By far the best egg cooking method is “sous vide”, i.e. cook eggs at the exact final temperature you want them to be, and then it doesn’t matter that much if you cook them for 20 min or 40 min. I like my eggs sous vide at 145F – custardy egg white and still creamy egg yolk.
Boiling eggs doesn’t work so well because the egg yolk solidifies at a lower temperature than the egg white, so it’s hard to catch eggs at just the right time. I just pop them into a sous vide oven for roughly a half hour at 145F, but the exact timing doesn’t matter.
Umm… everyone is wrong.
A freshly laid egg won’t peel easily when boiled. After a week is peels easily when boiled. Later on about 5-6 weeks it won’t peel easily again
As you can see here every technique is mentioned. The list is long. I have tried every single one. Non are perfect. None work the same everytime cause every single friggin egg is its own universe.
What you don’t see mentioned enough is the peeling. And lo and behold the solution! The spoon method. Make the eggs in any one of the 100 methods mentioned. Then when time to peel:
Gently tap the top and bottom. Gently roll the egg to crack it up a bit. Now take a spoon and find a nice spot to start. It’s different on every egg. Just that spot that peeled a bit. Gently work the spoon under the shell. A bit of practice and most eggs peel almost perfect.
THE SPOON METHOD
Why any particular egg has a “stuck shell” is a complicated question. But it is worth pointing out that if you know how, you can easily ensure that it hardly ever happens.
The standard method is to cook the eggs and then rapidly cool them in ice water. But to make them easy to peel, there is an extra step. After they’ve cooled for at least a minute in the ice water (to stop them from getting over-cooked and the yolks turning green) *submerge them in boiling water again* for about ten seconds, then plunge them back into the ice water. This causes the shells to expand slightly, pulling them away from the cooked egg. You will be completely amazed how easy the eggs are to peel after that. Whether done right away or after a few days of refrigeration, often all it takes is slightly cracking the shell, rolling the egg once to extend the crack around the whole egg, and the hard boiled egg will practically squirt out of the shell.
There is a membrane between egg and shell. Put eggs in the cold water right after boil will allow the membrane detach from egg and becoming adhesive to the inner wall of shell. This is due to heat expansion and cold contraction.
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