How to Boil an Egg
Below is an excerpt from a previous newsletter that's graduating to the site. I added some extra Harold McGee wisdom for good measure.
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Filling the Void
If you are what you eat, then I am an egg.
In an episode of Italy Unpacked: Land of Many Treasures (Series 1, Episode 3, 2017), Giorgio Locatelli made some ragù and referred to the “bible” of Italian cooking, Pellegrino Artusi’s Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well (1891).
Artusi was passionate about science and food—a 19th-century Italian Harold McGee of sorts. Despite the cookbook being reprinted 13 times just in his lifetime, he initially couldn’t find a publisher (similar to the challenge Julia Child faced). I added the book to my library and flipped to the eggs section, the first recipe being #139: Uovo a Bere e Sode (Soft-boiled and Hard-boiled Eggs).
Digressing briefly…there's an abundance of content on how to boil and peel eggs. The usual suspects regularly update their methods, professing to have cracked the code with baking soda and other hacks. I excel at overthinking and overcomplicating matters, but sometimes the internet is just reinventing the wheel for the sake of filling the void.
That minor dig aside, let's unironically proceed with the rest of this post.
Omma's Garden - Santa Monica Farmers Market
Ingredients
- Eggs, preferably not fresh off the farm
Instructions
It turns out that in 1891, Artusi knew how to boil eggs. He stated as follows:
Soft-boiled eggs should be boiled for two minutes; hard-boiled eggs for ten. Start counting from the moment you immerse them in boiling water. If you prefer them lightly boiled, six or seven minutes should be long enough. In either case, as soon as you remove the eggs from the boiling water, put them in cold water.
That’s it, four sentences and no fuss. I hard-boil at least a dozen eggs each week and can attest his approach works. Even so, in the spirit of overexplaining, indulge me in three brief notes.
Recipe Tips
Timing
I simmer for 12 to 13 minutes to produce a relatively solid but not chalky yolk.
Cracking
Cold eggs very occasionally crack when going into the boiling water, so I “temper” the first couple. Using a slotted spoon, I dunk the eggs a few times, then slide them into the pot. My hunch is that cracking indicates the shell was compromised to begin with, but I don't have proof for that theory.
Peeling
There's one farmer I buy from whose eggs are so fresh I suspect his hens are in the truck. Those are the only shells that tend to give me trouble. My solution is to age them for 10 days or so before cooking. As Harold McGee explains in On Food and Cooking, there's a scientific explanation behind that reasoning.
The best guarantee of easy peeling is to use old eggs. Difficult peeling is characteristic of fresh eggs with a relatively low albumen [egg white] pH, which somehow causes the albumen to adhere to the inner shell membrane more strongly than it coheres to itself. At the pH typical after several days of refrigeration, around 9.2, the shell peels easily.
And workarounds can have consequences...
If you end up with a carton of very fresh eggs and need to cook them right away, you can add a half teaspoon of baking soda to a quart of water to make the cooking water alkaline (though this intensifies the sulfury flavor). It also helps to cook fresh eggs somewhat longer to make the white more cohesive, and to allow the white to firm up in the refrigerator before peeling.
But if you're cooking them longer to set the young whites, how chalky might those yolks become? Patience, it seems, wins out.
No wheels invented in the writing of this post.
Farmers | Artisans
I make an effort to source my food from California artisans with a special focus on the Santa Monica Farmers Market. Below is a list of the people who contributed to this dish.
- Munak Farms // Eggs
- Apricot Lane Farms // Eggs
- Schaner Farms // Eggs
- Omma's Garden-Kaliko Farms // Eggs
Tools
My Favorite Cooking Tools spotlights the kitchen equipment I’ve owned and used for years from bread baking to coffee brewing.
Newsletter
Subscribe at the bottom of this page for the Chic Eats roundup. It includes new and updated recipes along with a grab bag of unique content that was interesting enough to share around the dinner table.
Gratuitous photo from one of the sunrise runs that fuels my hard-boiled egg habit. Picking a favorite shore bird is like choosing a favorite cookbook, but snowy plovers—like Pudge here—probably win.
