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Howdy Herd. Doctor put me on a very strict diet. Damn. I hugely miss eating almost anything my gullet desired. Damn. Oh well. As the Baby Boomer mob ages not-so-gracefully sacrifices must be made to extend our presence upon the planet so that we can annoy and harass Generation X and Millennials and Generation Z / Zoomers and any other damn generation that appears.
One of the foods allowed me is the incredible, edible egg. Fried eggs are yummy but I am severely limited as to the amount of bread I can eat. Damn. Scrambled eggs are tasty but I also prefer them with bread but I am shunning bread to an extreme so I gobble the scrambled down but they are not very filling to me. Damn.
Okay. How else is there to prepare the egg? Soft boiled? Not for me. Hard boiled? Hmmmmm . . . I can do a bunch at once and have them waiting for me in the refrigerator. A plus is minimal dishes to wash. I use a large pot that allows me to boil 18 large eggs at one time. I store the hard-boiled eggs in a large plastic container with a snap-on lid. When eating time arrives I crack, peel and eat. No dishes needed for that method. Cleaning the metal pot and plastic container are easy, nothing sticking that requires scrubbing!!!
When hard-boiled egg eating time arrived a problem arose. Crack and peel and eat, right? Well, no. Crack, peel and hunks and chunks of eggs were often removed with the shell. Damn. A few eggs peeled as I wanted but far too few. An oddity was with a few weirdo eggs that peeled the outer half of the white innard leaving a mini-hard-boiled egg. Damn. Even rarer was the peeled egg that disgorged the yolk alone with the white meaty portion departing with the shell. Damn.
It is time to seek advice on how to boil an egg so that it is easy to peel leaving the damn thing intact for eating. As expected the Web has a huge number of Web sites offering advice. Lazy me consulted but a few. Here is one that offers lots of advice and appears to have been created by a chap intimate with crafting the hard-boiled egg:
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How to Make Perfect Hard-Boiled Eggs | The Food Lab
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Poking around the Web I find this site:
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Having tried a few of the suggestions found at various sites the advice of lowering the raw eggs into already-boiling water was a first for me. So I tried it. I used a plastic ladle with multiple holes in it to lower 3 to 4 eggs at a time into the boiling water.
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I combined advice from this site with advice from the one above:
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The All-Time Best Way to Cook Hard-Boiled Eggs
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Experimenting and combining advice from the above Web sites after placing the eggs in boiling water I noticed that the boiling stopped due to the cold eggs absorbing heat (or are they shedding cold?). Later efforts had me soaking the eggs in hot tap water before adding to the boiling water. Doing that seemed to allow the water to reach a second boil sooner after placing the eggs in boiling water.
Pre-heat the damn eggs in hot tap water. Fifteen to twenty minutes of hot water soaking seems to be more than enough. When the pot full of water atop the stove starts boiling place the warmed eggs in that pot. I use a plastic ladle that handles the boiling water to gently ease the eggs to the bottom of the pot. This prevents possible cracking if the eggs are merely dropped into the boiling water and they rush to the bottom impacting the surface akin to the Titanic plummeting down into the cold, dark waters of the north Atlantic Ocean. Glub. Splat.
The boiling water stops boiling. I let the flame remain (if you use an electric stove this advice remains the same) to heat the water back to a rapid boil. Do I need to tell you vagrants and hooligans that a covered pot heats the contents quicker? After a rapid boil is regained I turn off the heat and let the eggs bathe luxuriously in the hot water with the cover still on. I have let the eggs sit for as little as 12-minutes to as long as 20-minutes and the end result is pretty much the same; hard-boiled eggs. Practice. See what sitting time works best for you.
When done sitting I grab the pot and place it in the sinks and run cold water into it to stop the cooking process and allow me to handle the eggs. Careful, kids. After the eggs are cool enough to handle with bare, naked flesh the insides are still hot, especially the yolk. Peel and bite too soon and you may yipe with pain at the hotness inside your mouth.
The coking part is done. Cracking time arrives when you want to eat the egg. This was my problem area as mentioned in the introduction. The plunging into boiling water method apparently eases the peeling process. To further assist you vagrants and ne’er-do-wells and assorted pyscho- and sociopaths and other paths infesting this declining USA swirling down the drain to ultimate eventual destruction here is my de-shelling advice:
Pound the damn egg on a hard surface. All over the egg. Not too hard but don’t be a wimp, either. Up, down and all around. Cover that damn thing with cracks. Turn on the cold water over the garbage disposal section of your sink. That device will handle the discarded shells. If your sink gets plugged by shells that’s your problem and I do not want to read about it. My sink and disposal seem to handle the discarded shells well.
Under the running water roll the egg between your hands. Press firmly. I am surprised how much pressure can be exerted without damaging the goodness within the shell. Roll this way and that way. End to end and side to side. Roll as if rolling was as fun as your first date where you got to touch a titty or your titty got touched by a dude you had the hots for. I have pleasantly learned that many of the eggs I handle this way have large sections of the shell falling away leaving an intact egg ready to eat. A few of the eggs require a bit more work where fingers need to pick at shell pieces to pull them away from the egg but they almost always pull free without damaging the edible aspect of the egg.
That’s it. Nothing fancy. Simple. But it seems to work. Now I will look for a video showing the process.
Just watched a video with the faceless voice telling us to use eggs straight from the refrigerator, plop into boiling water then lower the heat and let the eggs simmer for 13-minutes for extra-large eggs then remove from heat, pour in cold water then add ice for 15-minutes. Then you are ready to peel. Bah. Too much effort. My method is easier. Off to seek a better video.
Watched several videos and none of them followed my method exactly. A math wizard could tell us how many ways there are to cook and peel a hard-boiled eggs but i could only guess that the variables may be in the hundreds of ways. Yuck. Too much effort. The link below is to YouTube with a huge number of videos about cooking and peeling eggs.
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Hours of Fun or Boredom About Ways to Cook and Peel Hard-boiled Eggs
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My job is done. I am hungry and after I post this entry I shall crack and eat four hard-boiled eggs.
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***** UPDATE *****
June 11, 2023
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Hello, Herd. An observation. After hard-boiling the eggs and placing them in the refrigerator for future cracking, peeling then eating; the longer the egg sits in the refrigerator, the easier it is to peel. A glance at search engine returns states that hard-boiled eggs still in the shell are good for 7 days after being boiled and placed into that handy device that keeps our vittles cold. Imagine life without a refrigerator. That would suck immensely!!! Refrigeration, one of the great inventions of our era!!! Toss in harnessing electricity. Need that to get the refrigerator operating.
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I forget if I mentioned this already, and I am too lazy to go back and read all the above to determine if I have already mentioned the following, so here it is whether already mentioned or not:
Extra-large size eggs crack when hard-boiled more often than do smaller eggs. I use large eggs. I should experiment with some medium and small eggs to determine how well they work, but smaller than large has a drawback. Well, for me, they do. Use smaller eggs and you have to peel too many to make a meal.
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For folks such as I, forgo the wondering about which size egg is the best economic value. Some egg-head in the past created a formula to determine which size egg was the cheapest. Of course, prices vary at differing stores and locations across the planet. Go hunt for the formula if you want. I will stick with the 18 in a box large eggs and I have already decided to ignore smaller eggs. That will give the curious amongst you something to do.
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So that ends the latest update and I am quite pleased that egg prices have dropped high atop the Ozark Plateau where 3rd-rate produce is sent due to the entrenched poverty and the few wealthy folks available to pay the high prices that the highest quality produce receives in elite-class enclaves where the wealthy among us cluster together to use their economic clout via sky-high rents and housing prices along with horrendously high real estate taxes to keep the huddles masses of common folks far away from the “deserving” cohort.
Have a nice day!!!!
I Adore Food 