Starting with boiling water. If you're about to place uncooked eggs in a pot of boiling water, stop what you're doing immediately. Making
cold water: you might have heard that you should start the eggs in room temperature or cold water and then bring them to a boil. This is a myth. According to our tests, starting with hot water yields eggs that are easier to peel—so always start by boiling your water.
Here's a hard-boiled egg tip that we know to be true: Starting your eggs in hot, already-boiling water makes them easier to peel. In a column for Serious Eats, cookbook author and food columnist J. Kenji López-Alt found that "starting cold resulted in eggs that had just over a 50% success rate for clean peeling.
Fill a medium saucepan with boiling water – you'll want to fill it about 2/3 full. Return the water to a boil. Or, if you don't have an electric kettle, you can bring the water to a boil in the saucepan. Carefully add the eggs to the boiling water and boil for 5 minutes.
According to Kaysen, adding the eggs after after the water is boiling often helps prevent them from overcooking. What's more, adding your eggs to the water after its boiling helps prevent that less-than-appetizing greenish-gray hue from forming around the egg's yolk.
4 minutes for slightly set yolk and set white. 5 minutes for a medium cooked firmer yolk and white. 6 minutes for hard boiled with lightly soft yolk. 8 minutes for firmly hard boiled.
To avoid getting a green yolk, cook your eggs just long enough to reach the desired doneness—no more. And quickly plunge the cooked eggs into cold water to stop the cooking process and minimize the iron-sulfur reaction. Some people also say that the cold-water plunge makes eggs easier to peel.
Give the eggs at least five minutes in the ice bath before you try to peel them—letting them cool may help make it easier to peel them, but it's also so you don't burn your hands.
It's important to start the eggs in cold water — bringing the water and eggs up in temperature together ensures even cooking and prevents cracking. Bring the water to a rolling boil over high heat, then immediately remove the pan from the heat. Cover, and let stand for 10 minutes. Carefully pour out the hot water.
Place eggs in a medium pot and cover with cold water by 1 inch. Bring to a boil, then cover the pot and turn off the heat. Let the eggs cook, covered, for 9 to 12 minutes, depending on your desired done-ness (see photo).
The boiling point
The most important part here is that you use cold water instead of boiled – if you boil the water first, the outside will cook faster than the inside resulting in an uneven texture. Cubed spuds will take around 15 minutes where larger chunks or whole new potatoes will be 20-25 minutes.
Adding milk or plain water to scrambled eggs is an optional step that affects the texture of your finished dish. For creamy scrambled eggs, you'll add up to 1 tablespoon of milk for every egg. For fluffy scrambled eggs, you'll add up to 1 tablespoon of water for every egg.
Chef Ramsay opts to boil his eggs for four and a half minutes to keep the egg's center slightly soft. When your eggs are finished boiling, drain the water and run the eggs under cold tap water in the pot. According to Chef Ramsay, cooling the eggs as quickly as possible prevents their yolks from turning gray.
Starting eggs in cold water greatly increases the chances of shell-sticking. Even with two-week-old eggs, starting cold resulted in eggs that had just over a 50% success rate for clean peeling. Eggs started in boiling water or steam came out well above 90%.
Shocking your recently boiled eggs by submerging them into a bowl of ice water is key. The quick cooling of the hard-boiled eggs causes the egg whites to contract, freeing them from the membrane. If you let them cool for about 15 minutes, the peeling is much easier.
Some people prefer to peel their hard-boiled eggs before storing – and that's A-OK. You'll just need to take a few extra steps: Transfer hard-boiled eggs to a bowl of cold water immediately after cooking to help them cool down faster. Peel the eggs under running water.
Keeping Hard-Boiled Eggs Fresh
For maximum freshness, leave them in their shells until you are ready to eat or prepare. The shell will help to protect the egg from bacteria, and can help prevent them from absorbing odors from other foods in your refrigerator.
Reuse Cooking Water
Those who cook with water need to learn how to reuse water that is cooking the food. If the water is being used in something like pasta, then there's no problem with reusing the water when cooking another type of pasta, potatoes, boiled eggs, vegetables or other types of foods.
Carefully place the eggs in a large saucepan; add cold water to cover by one inch, and bring to a rolling boil. Cover pan; remove from heat. Let stand 12 minutes, then drain and rinse under cool water. To store, keep eggs unpeeled in the refrigerator, up to 4 days.
Let the water come to a gentle boil. The water will boil a bit more quickly with the lid on, but it's fine to leave it off if you'd rather keep an eye on the eggs. You can stir the eggs very gently every now and then to make sure they've not settled at the bottom, where they'll cook less evenly and break more easily.