EDIT: 5/11/16 (see below)
I am terrible at peeling hard-boiled eggs. Truly. I always ruin a few so completely the whites are thrown back to the chickens in shame and the yolks are salvaged for the devilly part. As a result, I have spent several years pretending they don't exist. My kids and husband love them, but when they mention it, I just let my face go blank, in complete denial.
I've been a backyard chicken keeper for a year now and I've decided I can no longer pretend hard boiled eggs are a thing of the past. I follow various forums and Facebook groups about chickens and enjoy reading what folks share about their self-declared perfect way to make hard boiled eggs. This weekend, I had some extra eggs and I decided I would experiment with three separate ways of cooking them and see if any of them could work for me. I used all fresh eggs also, one was about a week old, but otherwise, the eggs were from that day or the couple of days before. Who wants to have to care about waiting two weeks, am I right?
1. Steaming: This is the method I hear my fellow chicken folks discussing the most. So, I started on the Incredible Egg site with a recipe called:Easy Peel Hard-Boiled eggs. I don't have a steamer I could place in the pot, so I grabbed some hardware cloth (because we all have tons of that lying around) and bent it so it could fit in the bottom of the pan, keeping the 4 eggs out of the water. I filled the large pan about 3/4" deep with water and turned on the heat to bring it to a boil before I placed the eggs. I made sure the water wasn't touching the eggs.
2. Boiling: Next up was the standard way I've been cooking eggs with an interesting twist. Marc wrote this glorious blog post on how to make the perfect hard-boiled eggs depending on how much you like them cooked as well as for ease of peeling. He cracks the shell before boiling (check out the picture to the right), just enough to keep the inner membrane intact.
3. Last of this experiment was baking the eggs, according to this from Alton Brown. This was certainly the easiest method of the three recipes. I just popped the eggs in my fancy Pampered Chef muffin stoneware and stuck them on the center rack.
For my results, I'll start with my least favorite option, baking:
First of all, I love Alton Brown, but I'm not with him on this. This was by far the worst method, because the eggs weren't cooked through. As a result, the peels clung to the eggs like it was a love affair.
I have a fairly new oven that has not given me temperature issues previously and I waited for the pre-heating to complete before I popped them in to bake, but they simply weren't done. The egg whites were still runny (see the picture to the right). I was super disappointed, because this would have been such an easy approach.
My second favorite method was the boiling with the cracked shells. This was fine, as long as you aren't terrible at peeling eggs like I am. I followed the instructions in the recipe exactly, not adding salt or anything to the water.
I'm a little sad this one wasn't super helpful with peeling as I love the details he provides. Clearly a lot of love went into this post. Check out my horrible eggs on the left.
This method was clearly no different to me than my usual difficulties. I didn't find the crack in the egg before boiling was more helpful than cracking them afterwards.
But we have a winner, without doubt.Steaming! This method certainly made all the difference when peeling these eggs and they were cooked perfectly. I didn't have much of an issue peeling them at all, two of them even peeled about perfectly. I highly recommend using this method when making hard-boiled eggs and it's certainly going to be something I don't have to avoid anymore.
UPDATE: So one more thing to add to the peeling miracle. I read on one of the many chicken pages I go to of a woman who uses a spoon to slide under the membrane under the shell and pop the shell off. This is true and worked like a charm for me yesterday. Check out how amazing these eggs look.
No comments:
Post a Comment