How to boil eggs so that they are easy to clean and delicious

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

This is the perfect boiled egg. Oval, smooth, white elastic, but not rubbery, the yolk is delicate and bright yellow, located exactly in the center. It is tasty and easy to clean. This article will show you how to get such a hard boiled egg in your kitchen.

Renowned American chef, food blogger and writer Kenji Lopez-Alt, a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, often conducts scientific and gastronomic experiments. One of them dealt with boiling eggs.

Over the past few years, I have boiled thousands upon thousands of eggs. And believe me, there is no one hundred percent reliable method. However, old science increases the chances of success. If you listen to its laws, you can get an easy-to-peel hard-boiled egg with a well-boiled yolk and tasty protein. Kenji Lopez-Alt chef, food blogger, writer

Freshness

You've probably heard from mothers and grandmothers that laying eggs are better cleaned.

The "age" of eggs really matters, but only if they are very, very fresh, literally from under the chicken. If you buy eggs from farmers or keep chickens yourself and do not want to suffer while peeling eggs, then let them lie down for a couple of weeks in the refrigerator.

If you buy eggs at the supermarket, there is little point in waiting. While they are packaged at the poultry farm and delivered to retail outlets, enough time will pass - the eggs will have time to “grow old”. In addition, for the end result, it is not the shelf life that is much more important, but the method of boiling the eggs.

What water to dip into

Most of the inhabitants of megalopolises store eggs in the refrigerator and boil immediately, barely taking out, since there is no time to wait until they warm up at room temperature. Usually we just put them in a saucepan, fill them with cold water and send them to the stove. And that is why some of the protein then remains on the shell.

To clean the eggs quickly and easily, immerse them in boiling water.

Even if you take two- or three-week-old eggs and boil them in cold water, half of them will not clean well. The following picture clearly demonstrates the advantages of a "hot start" over a cold one.

According to Kenji, here it is like with steaks: if you put a piece of meat in a cold frying pan and slowly heat it up, the blood clotting process will begin and the juice that should be released, soaking the meat, will remain inside. When heated with water, the egg white cooks slowly and adheres firmly to the shell membrane.

So, the hot start ensures easy cleaning of the eggs. But, alas, there is a flip side of the coin. When you boil the eggs in cold water and over low heat, the yolk remains properly in the center; when you throw your eggs into the bubbling boiling water, they whirl and flop. As a result, having cut a boiled egg, you may find that the yolk is uneven and is located, to put it mildly, asymmetrically.

The way out is steam cooking - in an electric egg cooker or in a saucepan on a special grid. This makes it easier to control the thermal processes inside the egg.

What happens to an egg during boiling

Take a look at this photo. There are eight eggs on it: the first was boiled for one minute, the second - three, the third - five, and so on.

Let's take a look at what happens to an egg when it ends up in a saucepan and starts to cook. First, let's look at how proteins react to an increase in temperature.

• 0-60 ° C … The liquid protein heats up slowly.
• 60 ° C … Some of the proteins, called glycoproteins, begin to bind to each other to form a matrix. The protein acquires a white-milky color and a jelly-like consistency (in the picture above - an egg after three minutes of boiling).
• 68 ° C … The glycoproteins of the egg white are formed: it is no longer transparent, rather dense, but still looks a bit like jelly (see the egg after five minutes of boiling).
• 82 ° C … Ovalbumin is released - this is the main protein of egg white, thanks to which it becomes snow-white and elastic (see eggs after seven- and nine-minute boiling).
• 82 ° C and more … The higher the temperature, the stronger the protein bonds. And the longer the cooking time, the drier and harder, like rubber, the protein becomes.

The yolks have a slightly different set of temperatures.

• 63 ° C … The yolks thicken and begin to cook.
• 70 ° C … The yolks have hardened, but they are still tender and bright yellow.
• 77 ° C … The yolks turn pale and become crumbly.
• 77 ° C and more … The yolks begin to dry, their texture resembles chalk. The sulfur contained in the protein reacts with the iron in the yolk - iron sulfide is released, which slightly stains the yolk. Look at the eggs that have been boiled for 11 and 15 minutes: a characteristic gray-green rim has formed between the yolk and the white.

Thus, to get the perfect hard-boiled egg, with elastic white and tender yolk, which will be perfectly cleaned at the same time, you need to put it in boiling water, and after 30 seconds, when the quiet boil is again activated, reduce the heat and cook for another 10 minutes. … In the first half a minute, the whites will harden and turn white, and the rest of the time at the right temperature will cook the yolks.

We figured out the temperature and time, but what about the fact that eggs sometimes crack and flow out during cooking?

Steamed and in the oven

When cooking the old fashioned way, in cold or hot water, such incidents, alas, are not uncommon. Ugly, cracked and leaked eggs usually go to salads and other dishes that need small cuts. After all, you cannot serve them to the table and you cannot paint them for Easter.

Defects can be avoided by steaming the eggs or in the oven. But there are also nuances here.

For a couple

Pour water into a saucepan to the level of one and a half centimeters, put a special grate on the bottom. When the water boils, put in the right amount of eggs and start the timer for 11 minutes. When steamed, the proteins are slightly harsher than when boiled, but not rubbery.

Multicooker or double boiler

Many housewives have adapted to boiling eggs in a multicooker or double boiler. At the same time, they write on culinary forums that the eggs boiled in them literally jump out of the shells themselves, and their yolks do not turn green.

Usually they write that a hard-boiled egg is cooked in a multicooker for 10 minutes. But in practice, a lot depends on the model and power of the device, the cooking mode, the amount of water poured into the bowl. To determine the ideal ratio of all parameters, sometimes more than a dozen eggs have to be lime.

In addition, when cooking eggs in a multicooker and double boiler, in addition to temperature, pressure affects the result. If during normal cooking in water or steam it is not so important whether the egg will cook for 10 or 11 minutes, then in the case of a multicooker (double boiler), every second matters.

Compare: in the picture below, eggs that have been cooked in a double boiler for five, six and seven minutes.

At the fifth minute, the yolk is still watery, at the sixth minute - the very thing, tender, bright yellow, and at the seventh - it is already loose, a greenish shell has formed.

Oven

This is a popular hard-boiled egg method that has a number of benefits. Firstly, it is good when you need a lot of boiled eggs at once. Secondly, the eggs will not be beaten against each other.

To cook eggs in the oven, celebrity chef, TV host and food writer Alton Brown recommends wetting and squeezing a towel well, placing it on the oven rack, placing the eggs on top of it, and placing it in the cold oven for half an hour with temperature 160 ° C.

As you can see, the visual result is poor: brown spots appear on the shell. You will be even more disappointed when you peel an egg. The yolk shifts to the side on which the egg lies, and the protein turns gray in this place. Reducing the cooking time will give the eggs a better appearance from the oven, but they will not be easy to clean neatly. This is the main disadvantage of this method.

In addition, here, too, much depends on the model of the oven. The temperature inside the oven is unevenly distributed: it is always colder at the door, and hotter near the burners, which can have different configurations.

If you need to cook many smooth, smooth and tasty eggs, steam them in several batches.

Puncture

Before cooking, many pierce the eggs from the blunt end, where the air chamber (puga) is located. Even special ones are sold for this.

Why pierce eggs? Firstly, it is believed that this is less likely to crack the shell and the eggs are better cleaned. Secondly, the puncture helps to avoid the formation of a dent on the surface of the egg.

The older the egg, the bigger the puga, the bigger the dent will be when boiling. The renowned French chef, TV presenter and writer Jacques Pepín recommends getting rid of the air chamber through a puncture. But the problem is that water can flow into this small hole, and then the surface of the egg will resemble lunar craters.

There is another way to get rid of the scarecrow pit. To keep the egg oval, place it in ice water immediately after cooking.

Kenji says the ice shower works like shock therapy. The yolk and white of a freshly boiled egg are still plastic. When you dip a hot egg into cold water, steam is generated in the air chamber, which, in turn, is converted into water, and it takes up only 0.5% of the original volume of the scarecrow. Thus, the pliable yolk and white take up the vacated space - the egg becomes oval.

Cleaning

The decisive factor in the quick and easy separation of the shell from the protein is temperature.

For eggs to clean well, they need to cool well. Keep the boiled eggs in cold water for 15 minutes, or rather refrigerate them overnight.

By itself, it's pretty simple: crush the egg shell well with your fingers, then place it under cold running water and peel it gently.

5 Secrets to Perfect Boiled Eggs

Summing up, the following formula for the perfect hard-boiled egg can be distinguished:

1. Use eggs two or three weeks old.
2. Place the eggs in boiling water rather than cold water, or steam them.
3. After 30 seconds, reduce heat to low and cook eggs for 10-11 minutes.
4. Place the finished eggs in ice water for at least 15 minutes.
5. Clean completely cooled eggs under cold running water.

Following these rules, you will get an almost flawless boiled egg: oval, smooth, with elastic white, delicate neat bright yellow yolk, tasty and easy to clean. It is not a shame to stuff such eggs and serve them to the festive table.