Saturday, August 27, 2011

The best way to boil eggs

At our house, we eat a lot of hard boiled eggs.  I put them in tuna salad chopped up, the kids sometimes like to eat them for breakfast while they are still hot with some salt on them.   My "go to" potluck appetizer is deviled eggs served with capers for garnish.   We often make big batches of pickled eggs to snack on.      I usually get my eggs from the farmer up the road. The problem is that really fresh eggs are often hard to peel.  I used to buy old eggs at party stores because old eggs are much easier to peel.  However, after watching Food, Inc., I gave up eating store bought eggs.

I've found a better way to do it - steam the eggs instead of boiling them.   Simply place the eggs in a vegetable steamer and heat the water until it's boiling and steam them for 15 minutes with the lid on for hard boiled eggs.  Then just peel them by cracking the shells gently under cold running water.  While old eggs still peel the easiest, using this technique makes peeling even the freshest eggs much easier.  Sometimes, the white might still stick to the shell, but maybe only one egg out of a dozen.

All this talk of eggs is making me hungry for breakfast!

3 comments:

Gracious Salt said...

I can hardly wait to try this. Mark and I stopped to buy farm fresh eggs, but the seller wasn't home so good thing! Will go to Kroger (they don't sell washed eggs) and try at once. Thanks for the great tip. Bee

Maggie said...

I just saw steaming eggs on Chow this week and wanted to know if it was really worth trying. Do you ever do soft boiled this way and if so what time?

Cynthia said...

Yes, you can do soft boiled by conly steaming them for 10 minutes.