How to boil an egg.

To be quite truthful, I didn’t start life as a hard boiled egg fan. In fact, as a child just the smell of an egg salad sandwich would make me wretch. But things change. We now have an African-American President, Chastity Bono is now a man, and hard boiled eggs –if done with a sense of adventure — are one of my favorite snacks. A plate of eggs at a cocktail party never seems to last long. But before I can show you my husband’s favorite versions of this delicacy we must first boil the eggs. (Evidently, you can buy them pre-boiled but that just seems so wrong, right?) Google will get you up to several hundred methods for boiling the eggs and I strongly suggest you use one of them and don’t just assume you can go off and boil eggs without a recipe. Do it wrong and they will be overcooked, smelling like sulfer and have some weird green ‘skin’ on the yolk that you don’t know what it is. And you know that despite the glut of boiled egg methodology that exists, I’m going to offer up the one I use… the one that always gets me the right texture and color and no hint of over-dry yolk or a green ring.

You will get best results if you start off by using eggs that are at least a couple days old and are already at room temperature. This was advice I did not take myself this morning as I was in a hurry and it shows in the picture you see below. You can see I struggled a bit with the peeling and the color is not quite uniform even though they are just cooked through. Older eggs help with the peeling as they have started to develop a slight gas bubble separating the shell from the membrane.

How to boil an egg

1. Place eggs in a saucepan in a single layer and cover with an inch of water. Bring pan to a boil over high heat. Turn off the heat (remove pan from burner if you are using an electric stove), cover pan and let sit for 10 minutes. ( A bit longer if you have colder eggs but be careful!)

2. Have a bowl of water and ice cubes ready when the 10 minutes are up. Take each egg out of the hot water with a slotted spoon and put in the ice bath. Let eggs sit at least 5 minutes. I’m pretty sure it is this quick cool down that prevents the green skin on the yolk. Peel the eggs by rapping the shell on a hard surface and peeling back under the membrane.

Make deviled eggs!