How to Hard Boil Eggs: Easy Easter Tips for Hard Boiling an Egg!

For such a simple food, there is often much confusion over how to hard boil eggs. Though the desired result is always the same, people have various ways of getting there. If you want to know how to hard boil eggs, the best method is often trial and error until you find the perfect way for you! To help you get started in your quest for the perfect egg, we have some suggestions.

How To Hard Boil Eggs: Easy Tips For Getting That Perfect Egg!

Some people, including my best friend's mother, say the trick to a good hard boil egg is piercing the shell with a needle before boiling. I've tried this, and have found limited success with this method. I'm still not sure what exactly the purpose of the hole is, other than to allow the release of some egg white, resulting in a disturbing-looking white blob that forms around the hard boiled egg. We're not impressed.

My own mother would simply fill a pot with water, place as many eggs as could fit neatly in a single layer in the bottom of whatever pot she was using, and then turn the heat on high. When the water was boiling, she would turn the heat down a bit for a gentle rolling boil. After ten minutes, she'd shut off the heat and put a lid on the pot. After a few minutes more, she'd pull them out and stick them in the fridge.

Easter Egg Tip: To decorate your eggs, get creative! Don't just color them with food coloring and add stickers! Draw on your egg (after it's been boiled!) with a white crayon or wrap it with twine to get pretty designs when you dye them!

The method we use in our house involves the same basic principles (fill pot, add eggs, turn on heat) as my mother's, with a few little twists. First, I only leave the heat on for about 5 minutes, and place the lid on to trap the heat to cook the eggs the rest of the way. After about five minutes more (for a total of ten-twelve minutes of cooking), I pull the eggs and introduce them to a bowl of ice water.

As the boiling hot eggs are, well, boiling hot, I replace the ice as it starts to melt. I leave these in the ice water for five minutes before giving them another quick bath in the hot water. After a minute in the hot water, they go back into the ice water (with new ice) for a minute or two. Then, I place them in a dry bowl and into the fridge. I find alternating the hot and cold water helps in peeling the eggs later. I'm not sure why this helps; perhaps the hot and cold shrink and expand the whites inside their shell enough so that when the time comes to peel them, they've already sort of come away from the inside of the shell.

The truth is, it's up to you how to hard boil eggs. Just remember these critical tips:

Water should cover the eggs by about an inch or two. Don't worry if they float at first, just be sure the water would more than cover them if they were on the bottom. (Tip: The fresher the egg, the heavier it feels. Thus, eggs that sink fast are fresher and arguably "better" than eggs that keep floating.)

Always be gentle when placing your eggs in the pot. Don't allow eggs to bang into each other.

Test one egg to check for yolk doneness. If still mushy or undercooked, you can leave the rest of the eggs cooking until they're done. This is much easier than starting over again. Plus, the cook gets a well-deserved snack!

Source:

Personal experience
Family cooking methods