The Perfect Hard Boiled Egg

I've recently learned something that made this egg experience easier and I thought I'd share.

I never thought there was much to hard boiling an egg. Following my mother's pattern I put some in a pot of water, brought it to a boil, let that go on for a bit.

I should point out that the concept of a perfect egg never came up. Mom never made deviled eggs, and they're not a favorite of mine, so the fact that there was often a thin gray layer around the yolk never mattered. Truthfully, I thought that was just what they looked like.

Years ago I ran across the advice to bring the eggs to a boil, immediately cover the pot and take it off the heat and let them sit for 10-15 minutes. It works--you get a pure yellow yolk.

That's all well and good, but the part of the process that had me stumped was peeling the eggs. I know that older eggs peel more easily. I also know that putting the just-cooked eggs in cold water helps.

But it's gotten harder recently. This coincided with our switch to organic eggs. The shells are thicker. The appearance of the peeled egg isn't important to me because I'm either going to eat it as a snack or make egg salad. But it was annoying to struggle to get them peeled and lose half the egg white with the shell. And it wasn't that I was getting fumble-fingered. As my muttering escalated, my husband would come help and he had the same problem.

Then a little blurb appeared on my phone about making easy-to-peel eggs. It involved putting a small amount of baking soda in the pot with the eggs. It didn't help.

Discussing this with a friend one day, she said she only had trouble  peeling the eggs if they'd cooled off too much. If they had, she ran warm tap water over them and then they were okay.

This was an eye-opener. I always assumed that if a little time in cold water was good, a longer time would be better.

So I tried it. The first week, I pulled the eggs out of the then luke-warm water in about ten minutes. The first ones peeled easily, then got harder as I went along. Later it occurred to me that maybe taking them all out of the water at once was the problem. This week, I pulled the eggs out of the water one at a time and they all peeled easily.

And there you have it!

Or as one of my daughter's students once put it, "Wah-lah!"

For those of you who don't speak teenager, that's "voilà!"