How NOT to Boil an Egg

I love boiled eggs. They’re the perfect, portable, high-quality protein snack whose reputation has been quietly redeemed in the past few years… I love them so much, I don’t even need to salt them when they’re cooked right.

But cooking them right is trickier than it sounds. Too little, and your yolks come out gross and runny. Too much, and you get that overdone “egg-y” flavor assaulting you with its sulfur funk. You can’t tell, either, until you’ve already opened up the egg and ruined it.

After years of experimentation, I thought I’d finally found the perfect way to boil eggs. It goes like this:

1. Put your eggs in a saucepan and add enough cold water to bring the waterline about an inch or so above the eggs
2. Heat on high until the water starts a rolling boil
3. Turn the water off, cover the pan, and let sit for 17 minutes
4. Pour off the hot water, add some cold, and peel the eggs once they’re cool enough.

This method gave me fantastic boiled eggs: bright yellow yolks that were done without being overcooked in the slightest… well-cooked eggs with perfectly clean finishes.

It worked BEAUTIFULLY until I moved to a new house with a new stovetop that threw everything off. You’d think boiling=boiling, yet I kept ending up with an off-putting, jelly-like yolk consistency.

After getting thoroughly grossed out by my guinea pig eggs, I started boiled them for several more minutes, whereupon I was unable to peel them without taking out huge chunks of egg white. Essentially, everything but the yolk cemented to the peel.

So I began consulting Google, where I learned that adding a little baking soda to your water would make it easier to peel eggs after boiling but would also lend an aged, “egg-y” flavor, which hardly sounded like an improvement.

I also learned that there lots of experts on the internet who think they know the best ways of boiling and/or peeling eggs.

And I’m not one of those experts, though I can definitely tell you about one method you shouldn’t try:

Never, ever microwave an egg.

To explain why, let’s just start by pretending there was a hypothetical woman who really loved good hardboiled eggs…

Let’s just say she was in high-school when she once tried to hard-boil a couple of eggs on the stovetop, but miscalculated the time and ended up finding out her peeled eggs have gooey centers when she tries one.  Her eggs are almost done, but not quite.

Say her father then suggests she microwave the other egg to cook it just a tiny bit more. She asks him how much time he thinks would be sufficient and he suggests about thirty seconds.

Let’s further say she microwaves her egg for thirty seconds and bites into it once it’s cool enough to handle. Half-closing her eyes in anticipation of a perfectly-cooked, hardboiled egg, she instead ends up peeing herself as an ear-shattering gunshot explodes in her face when a nuclear egg event blankets the 3-foot radius around her in white particles, because she’d apparently just split atoms by throwing eggs into the microwave and will later have some pretty embarrassing mouth blisters to explain at school.

So… don’t ever try microwaving whole eggs to hardboil them. Hypothetically speaking, it’s probably not a good idea.

But I am curious about trying this baking method, despite the authors talking about it leaving weird red spots all over your eggs’ insides. I’m not sure what would cause that and frankly, I’m a little scared to find out.

At any rate, does anyone have a tried-and-true method that works for them? What about the problems with peeling hard-boiled eggs without the egg whites sticking to the shell?

Clearly, I could use some help.