If you cook at home, you need to make hard boiled eggs. Deviled eggs, sliced for green salads, chopped for egg salad sandwiches or combined with tuna fish for a great sandwich, hard boiled eggs are a necessity. You can even just eat them with a little salt. But damn, they are hard to do right.
Not really. People shy away from making hard boiled eggs, and even buy them at their local grocery store, because we’re all afraid of the cooking process. The eggs might break and run in the boiling water, leaving strings of cooked whites (if you’re chopping the eggs you’ll never notice). They may get overcooked and have that green ring around the yolks, even end up with a sulfur smell. Worse yet, they’re just a pain to peel.
To solve the peeling issue, use older eggs. How old? Here at HalfCracker we usually hard cook eggs when they are close to being tossed in the garden compost pile. You can tell your eggs are too old and ready for composting by putting them in a glass of water, if they float, toss them. If they stay on the bottom but stand on end, they’re getting close so boil them now. Otherwise, we usually just wait about two weeks after buying them fresh.
Here at HalfCracker we buy fresh eggs at a local farm stand, pretty much day of, or a few days after, they were laid. These are large eggs that happen to be brown (chicken eggs can be white, brown, green, blue or even a pinkish color, but the eggs are all the same. Color indicates nothing). If you buy eggs in the supermarket, get them from the back of the case. You can’t tell anything by the dates printed on supermarket egg cartons, they don’t really mean anything anyway, but look at the last three numbers on the carton. Those are generally the packing date, with the number being the day of the year. 001 is New Years Day and 304 is Halloween, the 304th day of the year. In general, the sell by date is something state laws may require and, if eggs carry the USDA logo, that date can’t be more than 30 days after the packing date. The government says that eggs are good for four to five weeks after the packing date if refrigerated, but that’s not really an absolute either.
On a side note, here at HalfCracker we don’t refrigerate eggs. They sit in a rack on the counter, waiting to be used. All eggs you don’t buy directly from the farm with the hens are pasteurized now, so they really aren’t going to give you any diseases anyway. In fact, eggs will never give you a disease, it’s what’s on the outside of the shell that does. If you’re really paranoid, wash the eggs with a bit of chlorine bleach in the water to kill anything on the shell. That’s what the packing plant already did on that three day code day of the year. (Note: If you raise your own chickens and collect the eggs daily, don’t wash them. Simply put them in egg trays in a refrigerator and they’ll keep for up to eight months. Washing removes a protective layer designed to allow eggs to hatch when the time is best.)
Okay, older eggs, say two weeks after the packing date, peel better. But how do you cook them correctly? Depends, are you boiling or steaming them? Boiling eggs is what our mothers, grandmothers and everyone back into the days of the Roman Empire does or did. It can be foolproof or it can get nasty. Here at HalfCracker, when we boil eggs, we grab a half dozen eggs and put them in a medium sauce pan. Fill the pan with water to about an inch or so over the eggs and put it on the stove burner. Turn the burner to high until the water reaches a rolling boil. Boil for a minute then move the pan off the heat and cover it. Let it stand for 12 minutes and then plunge the eggs into a bowl of ice water. Let them cool for about 15 minutes, smash the shells and peel them for storage or use.
That’s really it. People add a bit of vinegar in case the shell cracks, it’s supposed to keep the whites from running all over, or they’ll add salt because it supposedly makes them easier to peel. Neither helps here at HalfCracker and, yes, we do sometimes get a crack and spillage of the white. You’re rolling a bunch of thin shelled objects around in boiling water, it’s likely to happen at least once in a while. Which is why we don’t normally hard boil eggs.
We steam them. You could use your fancy super-cooker like an Instant Pot to do this, but that thing is a pain to set up and clean and, in our experience, takes longer. We just use that same medium sauce pan and a steamer basket. Put six eggs (or less, if you need more, use a wider pot) in your steamer basket and set it on the counter. Put about an inch of water in the sauce pan, bring it to a boil, then lower your steamer basket into the pan and pop on the lid. (Be careful if you only have a few eggs, they can roll in the steamer basket and get it unblanced, allowing eggs to fall off. Which is sure to crack them. You can leave the basket in the pot and simply add two or three eggs with tongs to get them into the steam.) Let the eggs steam for 12 minutes and then put them in ice water. Wait until they cool, 15 minutes again, and peel.
Notice the times are the same? Boiling water and steam are basically the same temperature (at sea level, water turns to steam at 100 degrees Celcius, or 212 degrees Fahrenheit) and cook the eggs at about the same rate. In both cases, the eggs are surrounded by the heat, submerged in water or surrounded by steam, and cook evenly in the same time. The real difference is you’re not banging the eggs around in boiling water so they’re less likely (actually, we’ve never had it happen) to crack, just hanging out in a steam bath.
The 12 minutes is for us here in Florida, where the highest point is the point on Cinderella’s Castle (Technically, it’s Britton Hill, at 345 feet above sea level, up in Walton County, almost into Alabama). If you’re in Colorado, where the Arkansas River is the lowest point at about ten times the altitude of Britton Hill (there are several rivers that could lay claim to the lowest point as they exit Colorado, the Arkansas is the better publicized), you’re going to need to increase the time. How much? Boil/Steam a few eggs and see. If you are on the Arkansas River in Colorado, the suspension bridge at Royal Gorge is awe-inspiring. By the way, if you’re over 10,000 feet above sea level, your eggs will basically never boil/steam or cook.
Tips
- Use a slotted spoon or tongs to get the eggs out of the steamer basket or boiling water and into the ice water bath.
- Half water and half ice makes a good ice bath for cooling eggs. The shock in temperature slightly shrinks the eggs inside their shells and this makes them easier to peel. Along with using older eggs, which change pH as they age and, in turn, loosen from the inner membrane, they should peel just fine.
- To peel the eggs, just lightly bounce the egg on the counter, crunching the shell into little pieces. The membrane under the shell will hold the pieces together so, when you do peel off the shell, it usually comes apart in a few pieces of membrane with a bunch of small shell pieces stuck to them.
- Throw those shells into the compost pile, they’re a great source of calcium for the garden.
- To store hard cooked eggs, put them in a closed container in the refrigerator for a few days to a week. Peeled eggs will pick up an odor if left open in your icebox.
- If you want a soft-boiled egg for breakfast, cook for three to four minutes and serve in an egg cup with a teaspoon. Crack the shell open when ready to eat.
Spider Eggs
For Halloween, try making spider eggs. Similar to Easter eggs, these make great decorations and treats at parties. Simply crush the shells like you were going to peel them, but instead of removing the shells, drop the hard cooked eggs into the juice from some canned beets. A day or so in the beet juice will let the juice seep through the cracks, making reddish spider webs appear on your hard boiled eggs. Slice them in half for some spectacular deviled eggs during the costume party.
Listen, we all know eggs were bad for you, then good again. This seems to change depending on what some obscure government bureaucrat reads into the science of cholesterol after the latest report but eggs have been eaten for thousands of years, most of those without any government regulations, and they’re good for you. Unlike those pickled beets you got the spider egg dye from, those things are an alien plot to take over the world. Along with brussel sprouts.
Disclaimer
This is how we do it here at HalfCracker Ranch. It should work fine for you and you shouldn’t get sick from any of our recipes or methods. That said, you’re in charge of your own and your family’s health, not us. If you think anything we describe is risky, unsanitary or downright dangerous, don’t do it. We can’t know what you may or may not be allergic to, what special dietary requirements you might have or what any of your particular tastes are. Those things are up to you and you are really the only one who can make those choices.
In other words, if you get sick or die from one of our recipes, don’t blame us. We haven’t got enough money to interest your lawyers anyway.