Eggsperiments in peeling hard boiled eggs

I find the best way to peel hard boiled eggs is to hold them under cold running water as soon as they have finished cooking until they are cool enough to hold comfortably in your hand. Not entirely fool-proof, but the organic eggs I get from the farm peel more easily than supermarket ones, presumably because they are fresher when I get them. (The "use by" date is normally two or three days longer than on supermarket ones bought on the same day - I always pick the ones from the back with the longest date on in Tescos)
 
Elawin said:
I find the best way to peel hard boiled eggs is to hold them under cold running water as soon as they have finished cooking until they are cool enough to hold comfortably in your hand. Not entirely fool-proof, but the organic eggs I get from the farm peel more easily than supermarket ones, presumably because they are fresher when I get them. (The "use by" date is normally two or three days longer than on supermarket ones bought on the same day - I always pick the ones from the back with the longest date on in Tescos)
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It should be the other way round. The fresher the egg the harder it is to peel because the membrane is tougher and more adherent to the egg. The older the egg, the easier to peel. Its a scientific fact, not my personal observation.

How do you know how old the organic eggs are?
 
It won't be the freshness of otherwise of the eggs that is the factor above (supermarket verses unknown breed organic farm) but the breed and age of hen that laid them. You can't compare the two because of that.

With that aside, from my own hens (known which eggs come from which hens and all organic and less than a week old), I can tell you that the difference I have found is not age related at all but salt related when cooking.

It doesn't seem to matter whether you put the eggs in hot or cold water from the word go, I prefer cold because I end up with fewer cracked eggs, my husband prefers to put them into hot water. Both of us put the eggs into cold water as soon as the cooking time is up. The difference is salt. I forgot last weekend and not a single egg peeled easily with lots of egg white left behind on the shell and membrane. This weekend I put in 2 tsp of salt for the 3 dozen I cooked in one go. Enough cold water to cover the eggs for an inch and dropping the simmer once it was up to boil so add not to bang the eggs around tor much.

After cooling them down in a bowl of cold water (not running I can't allow that kind of loss of fresh water with reserves as low as they are) they were dried, checked for cracks and refrigerated overnight whilst the vinegar and vessels for picking them were prepared (we will cook a dozen in one go to eat over a couple of days so often have hard boiled eggs in the fridge in shells, they get marked with a HB to distinguish between them and fresh eggs). I then sat and peeled 30 of them and all but 1 peeled with ease. That one is from an old girl with laying issues and known calcium problems and normally we don't hard boil her eggs. Last weekend it was a different matter altogether with the one I forgot to put salt into!
 
morning glory said:
It should be the other way round. The fresher the egg the harder it is to peel because the membrane is tougher and more adherent to the egg. The older the egg, the easier to peel. Its a scientific fact, not my personal observation.

How do you know how old the organic eggs are?
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You don't know how old any organic or free range eggs are. When we kept our own chickens, they were not cooped up 24 hours a day, but used to have time to wander round the garden. Many a time we used to find eggs under the rhubarb leaves or behind the compost heap, apart from all sorts of other weird places. Usually they were spotted pretty quickly, but sometimes we didn't have a clue how long the eggs had been in the hiding place. There is/was a free range chicken farm near Harlow where the chickens often used to be on the wrong side of the fence, and eggs could be found laid on the verges at the side of the road.

Boxed, commercially produced eggs should have a use by date on the boxes of a certain number of days. Some also have a packing date on them. I have found that the organic eggs I get have a use by date two or three days later than the freshest eggs I can find in our local Tescos who have several deliveries a day, and can have no eggs in the morning and an aisle packed out with them in the afternoon. It's the same with milk. The milk I get comes from Riverford's own dairy and typically has a use by date of 11 or 12 days. The milk left by the milkman comes from Müller and their use by date is at most a week.

I used to get loose eggs from a nearby farm. Theirs never had any use by date at all. I used to use them for cooking/baking, never for stand alone egg meals (i.e. fried or boiled etc). Sainsbury's used to sell eggs for cooking only. I was always slightly suspicious of how fresh they actually were.

As far as peeling eggs are concerned, I would say that I nearly always have 4-6 eggs left when my next lot are delivered. Eggs that I hard boil could therefore be over a week but never as long as a fortnight old before I use them. It's the older eggs that I always have trouble peeling, but you should know by now that I have always been a contrary ***
 
@SatNavSaysStraightOn , I trued the salt method on the Black Farmer eggs (I've written about them before). It didn't work. There is something about those eggs which might be to do with food additives used to make the yolk such a vibrant yellow which also affects the membrane making it adherent and tough. I now don't even try to hard boil them. The eggs I use for hard boiling are Burford Browns - their yolk is nearly as good in colour. I will try the salt with them next time.
 
morning glory said:
@SatNavSaysStraightOn , I trued the salt method on the Black Farmer eggs (I've written about them before). It didn't work. There is something about those eggs which might be to do with food additives used to make the yolk such a vibrant yellow which also affects the membrane making it adherent and tough. I now don't even try to hard boil them. The eggs I use for hard boiling are Burford Browns - their yolk is nearly as good in colour. I will try the salt with them next time.
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It does require a lot of salt surprisingly. I would imagine we are talking about 1 tablespoon of finely ground sea salt per litre and some eggs need more. I think the aim is to try to draw water out of the shell through osmosis whilst cooking, putting them in cold salted water from the word go would work better. I guess you could even experiment and put them in salted water for an hour before cooking to see if that helps.
Elawin said:
You don't know how old any organic or free range eggs are. When we kept our own chickens, they were not cooped up 24 hours a day, but used to have time to wander round the garden. Many a time we used to find eggs under the rhubarb leaves or behind the compost heap, apart from all sorts of other weird places. Usually they were spotted pretty quickly, but sometimes we didn't have a clue how long the eggs had been in the hiding place
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We rarely have issues with our girls laying where they are not meant to. All next sites found are destroyed, rubble or similar put in the way of leaf litter removed. The girl is often caught mid lay so lifting her and moving her back to the coop and a locked nest box (actually a pet carrier) and left in the until she lays very quickly resolves the problem on the rare occasion it had happened. Even my routine escapee will actually break back in to the outer enclosure to lay in the next box before trying her escape act again.
So we always know how old a free range egg is and if we find a site with eggs in it, they are never more than a day or two old.
 
This was a fresh duck egg on Monday this week. Of the batch of 20 from the market, 6 were a little smaller than the rest so my wife asked me to hard boil said for later. This was one which had been in the fridge since yesterday and it peeled perfectly with minimal effort (I peeled it myself). The yolk is almost in the centre.

boiled egg 4 s.jpg


boiled egg 5 s.jpg
 
I use a method that is supposedly derived from Julia Childs' method. Cold water, covered pan, high heat to boil, and then turn off the burner and let sit for your amount of time. I generally start at just short of 9 minutes, which is a very soft hard boiled egg up to 11 minutes for a hard boiled egg depending on what I'm using it for. I've been told you can do a 6 minute egg this way, which is supposed to be a soft boiled egg, but have never tried it. After the time is up, drain the hot water, fill pan with regular tap water, wait a couple of minutes, dump that. Shake, rattle and roll your eggs in the pan to get them cracked, not too hard, you don't want to beat them up, just crack them, refill with tap water and let sit for 10 minutes at least, then peel. I very, very rarely have any trouble peeling using this method, even if they are just bought eggs, which in our case usually means a week old at least as we have to go out of our way to get fresh eggs.
 
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That is extremely close to my method of boiling eggs.

I usually leave the water boiling for 60 seconds and then remove from the heat and leave covered. After 2 minutes 30 seconds, place in cold water to stop the cooking process for soft boiled eggs, viz:

duck eggs toast 4 s.jpg


and longer for the harder boiled eggs (the ones above were left 15 minutes).
 
Yorky said:
The ones above were not left 15 minutes but only 2½ minutes. (I must have been having a bad day). These eggs were left 15 minutes....

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And those were cooked some time ago when I had fewer problems in centering the yolk.
 
If anyone is interested in cooking science, here's some info of my own observations. The text won't be organized like a doctors summit and full of totally long and boring words
It's all about how materials react on heat. The heat source is obviously water and by adding just a little bit of acid the outcome will change drastically. Acid reacts with the shell and can dissolve it entirely, so you don't have to peel anything anymore.

But that's not all. Back to cooking eggs in plain, hot water. The protein inside of the egg solidifies at around 140f/60c. So... TBH the egg is shaped pretty bad by nature to cook it evenly, usually you don't want to overcook your proteins on either a too high temperature or for to long.

Ever had egg yolk cream? It's made by putting egg yolks into a piping bag, sous vide it and then blend it. The surface is flat, even so the heat can cook the protein everywhere at the same time and the only things preventing an even smoother product are the plastic barrier and the heat distribution of your sous vide device.
It's pretty cool and you can test it against a regular cooked egg to see how differently the cooked proteins react to their environment.

Now to the last point, hygiene...
Chefs learn it in the first weeks, there're bacteria growing on the surface and inside of your foods while cooking. They love it between 20c/68f and 60c/140f and you don't want your food spending to much time in that area...
The heat from the water has to go all the way through the middle, that's a pretty long way and yes there're the bacterias also being happy about that heat until they'recooked to death. While the bacteria in the egg grows until it's to hot, it reproducts and "sh*ts", as they also kinda eat and digest. BTW the poo can be toxic and some of it won't be destroyed after cooking. No joke but some people would prefer the taste of a regular cooked egg over the egg yolk cream, because they're used to it and everything else is unacceptable.

Wish you all the fun when cooking your next egg
 
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