Difficulty Level: Beginner
Being able to make hard boiled eggs may seem pretty basic, but if you learn how to do this you’ll open the door to many more cooking possibilities. Hard boiled eggs are used to make egg salad, and deviled eggs. Some people add them to their tuna salad and you won’t find a chef salad without hard boiled eggs. Of course you can’t dye Easter eggs without hard boiled eggs. Then there are things like Scotch eggs and pickled eggs and the occasional Braciole recipe that call for hard boiled eggs.
For our purposes we are learning to hard boil eggs properly for snacking and egg dying. I have never made any “fancy” recipes requiring hard boiled eggs and I don’t like deviled eggs. I made egg salad once and though it was a success our preferred way to eat hard boiled eggs is as is.
After you master this you can try your hand at some other recipes requiring hard boiled eggs.
Bonus: These hard boiled eggs will have a bright golden yellow yolk without that unattractive gray film that many people find when they make hard boiled eggs.
Hard Boiled Eggs
Eggs
Pot with lid
Water
Timer
Method:
Carefully place raw eggs into pot in a single layer.
Fill pot with enough water to just cover the eggs.
Place pot on stove and turn burner on high heat. Bring to a boil uncovered.
Once water comes to a full boil (lots of bubbles, looks like a hot tub) turn off heat and cover with lid.
Set timer for eight minutes.
Once timer beeps remove lid and place pot in sink under cold running water. You can alternatively add enough cold water and ice cubes to fill pot. I usually just leave the pot under cold running water. You are doing this to stop the cooking.
Keep eggs under cold running water until eggs are no longer warm to the touch. Be sure to pick up a couple eggs to feel temp. The water in the pot may feel cold, but the eggs could still be warm, meaning that they are still cooking.
Once the eggs are cool you can remove them from the water and dry them off with paper towels. It’s up to you whether you peel them all at once or just as you need them. To store eggs I like to put them back in an egg carton and mark the outside as hard boiled.
Check out those yolks! Bright, golden yellow.
As you can see the shell did not peel off very nicely. I haven’t tried any of the so called methods for producing shells that slide right off. That’s an experiment and a post for another day.