Hacks That Will Make Boiling Your Eggs So Much Easier
Do you boil a bunch of eggs on a regular basis? Maybe you’re following the keto diet, or you get invited to a lot of picnics. Perhaps you believe that an egg a day keeps the doctor away — whatever your reasons may be, you just may want to invest in an electric egg cooker. In fact, it’s really not that much of an investment. As SF Gate enthuses, their idea of a “perfect” breakfast starts with an egg cooker they purchased for under $12. (Amazon seems to have hiked the price up to $12.75 at the time of publication — darn inflation!)
So, what does an electric egg cooker do that makes it worth the counter space? This one will boil half a dozen eggs just the way you like them — soft, medium, or complicated — and comes with a cup that lets you measure the precise amount of water. It also comes with a tray that the eggs can stay in while you pull them out and douse them with cold water. There are even trays for cooking de-shelled eggs: cook the eggs whole, and they’re poached; stirred, and they become an omelette. So, is this an appliance you can’t live without? Maybe. But at any rate, it’s cheap enough to give it a go as long as you have room in your kitchen.
Boil eggs without water in the oven.
All the methods of egg boiling we’ve covered so far have one thing in common — they involve hot water. Actually, by definition, a boiled egg pretty much requires water to be used in the cooking process. Otherwise, it’s not truly boiled. Technically, then, these oven-boiled eggs are a bit of an oxymoron, but the fact that they’re baked in the shells does result in an end product that’s pretty darn close to the water-cooked kind. Plus, you don’t need to worry about splashing yourself while pouring the boiling water down the drain.
To make these baked-boiled eggs, you’ll need a muffin pan. Put an egg in each cup, then put the pan in a preheated 325 F oven. According to a handy chart put together by Wholesome Yum, after 20 minutes of cooking time, your eggs will be soft-boiled but still very runny. At 25 minutes, the eggs will be medium-boiled with soft yolks, while at 30 minutes, you’ll have a fully-set hard-boiled egg. Once you take the baked eggs out of the oven, you’ll still need to plunge them into cold water to stop the cooking process and prepare them for peeling.
Use this no-peel TikTok trick
TikTok cooking hacks can be pretty hit-or-miss, but some of them are relatively legit — at least if you know what you’re getting. With this viral TikTok video about making no-peel-boiled eggs, the no-peel part is genuine, but describing it as “boiled” is a bit of a stretch. In fact, these are just baked eggs —pure and simple. The same ones you’d get if you cracked eggs into muffin cups, ramekins, or avocado halves.
The twist here seems to be that the eggs are cooked not in individual servings but in a loaf pan. The TikTok creator just cracks the eggs into a greased pan and places that pan into a larger one that’s been half-filled with water (this is called a bain-marie if you want the proper terminology). She cooks the pan at 350 F for half an hour, and the result is a solid rectangle of unembellished eggs that can be chopped up and used in egg salads or similar preparations.
The thumbtack hack that is pretty genius
Perhaps you’ve looked over this list and decided that you’ll be sticking to the tried and true method of boiling your eggs the Merriam-Webster way or “subject[ing them] to the action of a boiling liquid.” After all, you really can’t beat a cooking method that’s been serving humankind for the past 30 millennia. Still, there’s one last egg-boiling hack you really ought to try, courtesy of Julia Child’s BFF, Jacques Pepin. In order to perform it, all you’ll need is a thumbtack (clean, of course) as well as an uncooked egg.
Once you’ve got the thumbtack in one hand and the egg in the other, locate the larger end of the egg, and then use the tack to poke a tiny hole in the shell. Now, boil your egg as usual. What you’ve just done is to (maybe) allow some of the gasses to escape from inside the egg and let a tiny bit of the cooking water seep inside. Either or both of these events are said to help make your egg easier to peel, while the former may also keep the egg from cracking while it cooks. We may not know precisely how the thumbtack trick works, but the Pepin endorsement alone is good enough for us.
