There was a time when I didn’t even know what a perfect boiled egg was. I love boiled eggs, unlike majority of the world population I’m sure. If you handed me a hard-boiled egg, I wouldn’t look at it with a discerning eye. I’d just pop it into my mouth.
When I needed hard-boiled eggs, I took my chances and guessed how long it needed boiling. Always. For years, this is what I did.
What a big surprise it was to find out your eggs don’t need to boil for 7, 10 or 11 minutes as I’ve read in magazines, cookbooks and who-knows-where-else I got my “boiling an egg” information.
Before I let you in on my secret, here are a few things a hard-boiled egg should NOT have/be:
1. Have that green ring around the yolk. This shows up and you know you’ve overboiled your egg. That’s an iron and sulfur compound that forms when you overboil an egg.
2. Have that unpleasant smell. Yup, you overboiled it and yup, it’s the iron and the sulfur compound.
3. Hard to peel.
4. Crack during cooking.
And now….*drum roll*……here’s The Unofficial Cook’s instructions on how to cook THE PERFECT BOILED EGG……*fading drum roll*…….
Place your eggs in a pot of salted, cold water with enough water to cover the eggs an inch.
Eggshells are thin. Like glass, they will crack with sudden temperature changes. Unless you started out with already cracked eggs, (or handled them like golf balls and cracked them yourself) a sudden rise in temperature will crack your eggshells during cooking. For the same reason, do not drop an egg into a boiling pot of water.
Bring your water to a rolling boil and immediately turn off heat. Keep it covered. For hard-boiled eggs, you’ll need to leave the eggs in the water for 10 minutes (a couple minutes more at high altitude) and 5 minutes for soft-boiled eggs. Take out of the pot and into some cold water to bring the temperature down.
Now because you added salt to the water, this will somehow help the eggs peel better. As always, peel your eggs with a bowl of water, or under a running faucet and make sure you crack the shell all over before peeling to make it easier.
If you don’t get perfectly boiled eggs using these tips, there’s no such thing as a perfect boiled egg!
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