Kitchen Dilettante

It hasn’t been long since my husband called me on the phone from his parents’ house in Michigan. He and his dad had gone there for a father-son week of doctor’s appointments and bonding. They had reached a point in their visit when they needed more for lunch than yogurt and fruit. They needed protein–easy protein. So, Hubby called to ask me the question we have all asked at some point in our lives: How do you boil an egg?

Boil, boil, toil and trouble! Actually, it's no trouble to boil an egg. Takes less than half an hour.

In discussing this with others and reading chapters about it in books, I have discovered that nearly everyone has their own slight spin on how to boil an egg. Boiling an egg is very easy, but with all the combinations out there for how long to do it, and what you do afterwards, and whether or not you put the lid on, etc., etc.–it’s no wonder new cooks scratch their noggins and prefer to leave the dear egg alone for someone else to boil.

But seriously, boiling an egg is easy. Here’s how I do it and then we’ll talk about some other stuff, like how long boiled eggs stay fresh and why boiled eggs go bad before raw ones.

Get the water really boiling, until the lid spits at you!

First, get out a pot. I use the smallest one I have because I tend to only boil about six eggs at a time. So, let’s use that as our sample: six eggs. If you boil less than six or more than six, the time for boiling them is the same. The size of pot will increase if you boil a lot of eggs at once, though. You want them all to lie flat on the bottom of the pan. Don’t stack them on top of one another.

Also, you want to have a pot large enough that when you put water into it, the water covers the eggs completely. I add enough water that I can insert my index finger into the water up to the first joint without touching an egg. That’s about an inch of water over the eggs.

So, now all the eggs are in the pot and so is the water. Put it on the stove, place the lid on it, and turn the heat to medium-high. Get it boiling. I mean REALLY boiling. The lid will probably sputter and spit at you. Don’t take it personally. It’s supposed to do that.

Once the water is good and boiling, turn the heat completely OFF. Leave the pot right where it is with the lid on. Don’t touch it. Don’t do anything at this point, except set the timer to 10 minutes.

Walk away. Go practice the piano for 10 minutes or write your grandmother an email. Go play tic-tac-toe with your little sister (and sometimes let her win if she is far younger and always loses to you). Do something for 10 minutes to get your mind off the waiting.

When the timer goes off, return to the kitchen and turn the timer off–otherwise the beeping will get annoying.

The next step is sort of dependent on where you live and/or how obsessive you are. I am an obsessive sort, so what I do is get a medium to large bowl and put about two or three cups of ice in it. Then I fill the bowl with cold water until the water level is an inch or two from the top of the bowl. Then I fish out each egg using a slotted spoon or tongs and place it in the icy water.

The boiled eggs get an ice bath. (Photo by Andrea Nguyen.)

This stops the cooking  process and creates a pocket of steam between the egg and the shell so that it will be easier to peel. It is important to keep the egg from continuing to cook if you don’t want the yolk to turn green. The green doesn’t hurt anything but it is a little unsightly. Yellow is so much nicer for a yolk, don’t you think?

This is a beautiful yellow yolk. (Photo by basykes.)

This is what happens when an egg is overcooked. In fact, this one is way overcooked. Typically, there is just a little smear of green around the yolk and, while it is not as pretty as the yellow, it is still edible. (Photo by quinn.anya.)

My husband discovered in Michigan in January that the tap water was cold enough he did not have to use ice and a bowl. He could just place the pot of eggs in the sink and run cold tap water over them for several minutes. We also agreed that the steam-pocket trick which makes it easy to peel the egg is only good right after the eggs are boiled and iced. After they sit in the fridge for a day or so, the magic is lost and the egg may or may not be easy to peel.

I learned from the United States Department of Agriculture that fresher eggs straight from the farm or the grocer tend to be harder to peel once they are boiled because, as eggs age, a little air pocket naturally forms in the shell. The older the egg, the more likely that air pocket will be there to help you peel the egg when the time comes. That air pocket, too, is why some eggs stick their little noses up out of the water when you go to boil them. So, it would seem that slightly older eggs are better for boiling than fresher eggs–but don’t let that stop you from boiling eggs you’ve just brought home. They may just be a little harder to peel. I will keep you posted if I learn any new tricks about peeling boiled eggs.

Peeled eggs, ready to eat. (Photo by Andrea Ngyuen.)

Once your eggs are boiled and cooled, feel free to crack into one and eat it. Otherwise, don’t peel them but make sure to get them into the fridge within two hours of boiling them.

Did one of your eggs crack while it was cooking? If it stayed in the pot the whole time, it should be cooked through as well and is fine to eat. Just eat that one first because it will be the first to spoil out of all the others.

Sometimes eggs crack when they boil. That's okay. As long as you eat them sooner, rather than later, they're fine to eat. (Photo by quinn.anya.)

Boiled eggs last about 7 days in the fridge. (They are not freezable.) Their expiration timer starts, though, as soon as water hits that shell. Here’s why: when the hen lays the egg, the process of laying also covers the egg in an invisible protective coating, keeping out bacteria. If the shell gets wet, you wash the egg, or boil it, that protective coating goes away, making the egg more porous and susceptible to icky bacteria like salmonella. That is why raw eggs last so much longer in the fridge than boiled ones.

So, that’s the scoop on boiling eggs and storing them afterwards. Let me know in the comments section how you boil eggs or if you have any questions.

I end now with a quote from Harold McGee, the creator of the cooking pantheon “On Food and Cooking”. It inspired me to learn more about our little miracle, the egg, so stay tuned for more articles and recipes in the future starring it.

Meanwhile modern science has only deepened the egg’s aptness as an emblem of creation. The yolk is a stockpile of fuel obtained by the hen from seeds and leaves, which are in turn stockpiles of the sun’s radiant energy. The yellow pigments that gave the yolk its name also come directly from plants, where they protect the chemical machinery of photosynthesis from being overwhelmed by the sun. So the egg does embody the chain of creation, from the developing chick back through the hen to the plants that fed her, and then to the ultimate source of life’s fire, the yellow sphere of the sky. An egg is the sun’s light refracted into life.

McGee, Harold (2007-03-20). On Food and Cooking (Kindle Locations 1910-1914). Simon & Schuster, Inc.. Kindle Edition.