If you remember from last week, I had recently experienced such awful luck with peeling hard-boiled eggs I had bought from the local Acme supermarket that I decided to complain about it on Facebook. Helpful friends suggested all manner of techniques for improving my success rate and I decided to take them up on it. I bought four dozen eggs, the same kind as my first dirty dozen, and picked three methods from the variety suggested by my Facebook friends to test out these "theories." I decided to test the same three theories each week (as well as my control group) so that I could see how the methods held up over a four-week testing cycle.
The most common hard-boiled egg theory out there is that older eggs peel easier than fresher eggs. While a single week older than when I bought them might not exactly qualify them as "old" eggs, I was interested to see how my second dozen fared. I brought out the usual suspects in terms of egg cookery and put this second dozen to the test: cooked in tap water, water with baking soda added to it, water with salt added to it and the ends of the eggs pricked, and the Cuisinart commercial egg cooker I had bought at the onset of the challenge.
Let's see how this week's eggs came out!
Control Group
6 cups of cold tap water
Time to come to boil: 12 minutes, 30 seconds
Time boiling: 1 min
Time sitting off heat: 11 minutes
Time cooled under cold water: 3 minutes
Control group ratings:
* Ease of peeling: 3. Two of the eggs peeled like the original ten I based the experiment on ... HORRIBLY!. The third egg peeled much easier, probably closer to an 8 if it was by itself.
* Outer appearance: 4. Two of the eggs looked absolutely horrible. The third egg, the one referenced in the "Ease of peeling" rating, was defect free.
* Texture: 9
* Taste: 10
The way that two of the three eggs peeled and looked after peeling was the reason I started this experiment and I'm kind of glad it happened, actually. While I can control from where I've sourced the eggs and try and match them as closely as possible, clearly, even using the control method (i.e. my original cooking method), changes are VERY obvious between dozens, even with a week of age on the eggs.
Commercial Egg Cooker
Time in the egg cooker: ~18 minutes, 30 seconds
Time cooled under cold water: 3 minutes
Water adjustment: - 1/2 tablespoon
Commercial Egg Cooker ratings:
* Ease of peeling: 10
* Outer appearance: 10
* Texture: 9. When I first tasted these, I thought they were a 10. Then I tasted the baking soda eggs and realized that they were incredibly tender, so I re-rated these a 9.
* Taste: 10. There was a distinct LACK of sulfur smell this week as I peeled the eggs, clearly a sign that they had not been overcooked. The smaller adjustment I made to the amount of water used (which is how the egg cooker actually times the cooking process) meant they were done just a little bit sooner than last week's batch.
Baking Soda In The Water
6 cups of cold tap water
1 teaspoon Arm & Hammer baking soda (sodium bicarbonate)
Time to come to boil: 12 minutes, 20 seconds
Time boiling: 1 min
Time sitting off heat: 11 minutes
Time cooled under cold water: 3 minutes
Baking Soda In The Water group ratings:
* Ease of peeling: 8
* Outer appearance: 8
* Texture: 10
* Taste: 10
While I was disappointed that the baking soda treatment numbers dropped slightly this week (in terms of peeling and appearance), with how much more difficult the control group was to peel this time around (and how badly they looked), the baking soda made a marked improvement on the outcome. While not perfect (like this week's Egg Cooker group), adding just a teaspoon of baking soda to the water made a substantial difference in how much easier the eggs peeled and how much better they looked. Interestingly, even though the amount of time they cooked was the same, these eggs were just a tad less cooked than the other three batches (or all four of last week's batches). This resulted in the whites being incredibly tender.
Salt In The Water and Egg Pricked
6 cups of cold tap water
2 tablespoons kosher salt (sodium chloride)
Time to come to boil: 12 minutes, 35 seconds
Time boiling: 1 min
Time sitting off heat: 11 minutes
Time cooled under cold water: 3 minutes
Salt In The Water and Egg Pricked group ratings:
* Ease of peeling: 9
* Outer appearance: 10
* Texture: 10
* Taste: 10
Surprisingly, the salted water and pricked eggs did very well this week. They were pretty gosh darn easy to peel and the surface of the peeled eggs was perfect. Interestingly, whereas last week they performed less than the baking soda eggs, this week, they clearly had the best non-commercial results overall and were just a touch better in the texture department.
So where does this leave us, gentle reader? I would expect that as I learn how to use the commercial egg cooker from Cuisinart, I would get better-to-perfect results. That being said, clearly given how horrible the results were for this week's control group, the results for both the baking soda and the salt/egg pricked groups was fairly impressive. Whereas the baking soda method ruled for last week's results, this week, it was the combination of adding salt and pricking the ends of the eggs that came up with the best non-commercial method of getting presentation eggs that also tasted good.
Come back one week from now to check out week number three of the great hard-boiled egg experiment and see if older raw eggs lead to easier peeling (and better looking) cooked eggs.
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