Why do some boiled eggs easily come out of the shell and others seem to fuse to the shell?
In: 1895
I can tell you the absolute quickest way to peel a boiled egg. Everyone does it wrong.
Put the egg under cold water until you can handle it. Crack a spot with something hard–anything. Put your thumb in the hole and then start pushing the shell sideways–the direction OF the shell. Do not peel up, that is wrong. Pushing the shell sideways, it will break off in large chunks and just keep doing that until it’s done. Takes only 5 seconds once you master the technique.
There is a real answer to this, and I think that it’s so hard to get a definitive answer that it shows the limits on current approaches to information technology.
Here’s the answer: steam the eggs. Doesn’t matter what temperature the eggs or the water start at. Just put an inch of water in the pan and put the eggs in with a lid on top. Cook them like that and you’ll get easy peel eggs every time. It took me years to discover this but once I started doing it this way I never even thought about it again.
Ever since I got a dedicated egg cooker (steams them with a little water on a hot plate), I have not had this happen anymore.
I’ve found that putting eggs in my steamer basket for 10 to 11 minutes they come out perfect and easy to peel every time
I occasionally boil eggs in an instant pot. They’ve always been very easy to peel. I don’t know if it’s the pressure or the steam or something else.
For perfect peeling hard boiled eggs every time I switched to steaming them. Steam for 16 minutes in a steamer pot or with a steamer basket. Don’t add the eggs to the pot until it’s fully steaming. After 16 minutes transfer the eggs to an ice water bath. Perfect peeling eggs.
I used to have the issue when I boiled them. I use a pressure cooker with just a little water and never have the problem.
My surefire method is to pressure cook them. Don’t know why but all my shells pretty much come off in one piece since trying this.
So… I actually tried this yesterday. I have chickens. I use an auto hard egg maker, like a counter top steamer. Then I always do an ice bath. Yesterday I put 10 4wk old eggs and 2 1day old eggs. Marked the fresher ones.
The two fresh eggs stuck to the peel, the other 10 fell right out basically. I’m going to continue to use aged eggs 🤷🏼‍♀️
It’s not the age of the eggs. Like others have said, dropping eggs into boiling water rather than bringing the temp up with both water and eggs is supposed to help. The cold water bath after seems to help a lot.
A lot of people online (YouTube) say to add baking soda or salt to the water, but I couldn’t see any differences when I tried that.
I personally have noticed that if I just leave them boiling way longer than necessary, like long after hey are cooked through, they get harder to peel.
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