HOW TO MAKE PERFECT HARD-BOILED EGGS
Have you ever found yourself in a situation where you needed your hard-boiled eggs to look PERFECT – maybe you’re making them to cut in half for deviled eggs, or maybe you’re serving them whole when friends come over? I used to nervously hope that the peel would slide off easily, but it was a guessing game! Until now. Now I KNOW how to make perfect hard-boiled eggs every. single. time. I’ve been testing this for the past couple of months. My kids love to eat hard-boiled eggs for lunch or snacks, so I make them at least once a week. So let’s just say that I’ve cooked them with a lot of different variables until I figured out the one common denominator.
Here it is — start with your eggs at room temperature. That’s it! Here in Europe, our eggs are sold on the shelf, not in the refrigerator. (If you’re not in Europe, don’t try leaving yours out! Our egg-laying hens are vaccinated against salmonella, and the eggs are left dirty. In the U.S. and other countries, the eggs are immediately washed with hot water and soap, which washes away the thin coating of the egg that is a natural barrier against bacteria, meaning you must refrigerate them!)
So I noticed that when I came home with my room temperature eggs and left them out to be immediately hard-boiled, those eggs would turn out perfect and easy to peel. When I took eggs straight from the fridge to the pan to hard-boil (being from the U.S., I refrigerate mine out of habit, even though it’s not necessary :-P), the peel would stick to the egg, and unless I spent an hour carefully peeling them, they wouldn’t turn out very pretty! So I tested what I had figured out to see if any other variables made a difference, but it all boiled down to (no pun intended, ha!) whether they started out cold or at room temperature. So get your eggs out an hour or so before you boil them and prepare to be amazed! Here’s how I hard-boil my eggs.
How to Make Perfect Hard-Boiled Eggs
1. Start with room-temperature eggs
2. Cover the eggs with at least 1″ of cold water and put them on the stove on medium-high heat.
3. Bring your water to a boil.
4. When the water starts to boil, remove the pan from the heat, cover it, and leave it for 15 minutes.
5. Drain the hot water off the eggs, rinse with cold water to cool them off, and let your eggs sit in an ice bath for 5 minutes.
6. Lastly, peel your eggs – peeling them under running water helps!
Look how beautiful and perfect the eggs are!
