egg mangled while peeling… the bluish bit to the right is irrevocably stuck to the white (the knife was not used in peeling, it is there to keep the egg from rolling over)

What a mess.

I am a lover of hard-boiled eggs. I make them 4 or 5 at a time to have on hand for breakfasts, or just to salt and pepper and eat out of hand. They are an excellent source of protein, they go with almost anything, and they taste good. What’s not to like?

What’s not to like is that this time of year, with really fresh pasture raised eggs, they’re almost impossible to peel. I get my eggs from Hadji Paul’s Chicken and Feed who come to the Farmers Market at Garden Shop Nursery on Sundays.

HB egg for breakfast with green beans, beet, roasted cauliflower, bits of potato and cheese curds

egg tool, for slicing or sectioning a HB egg.

sliced egg breakfast with castelvetrano olives, red beets, yellow beets and cheese curds

“There are two peculiarities associated with hard-boiled eggs. One is the occasional difficulty encountered when peeling the egg. It turns out that peelability is affected by the pH of the egg white, and so by the egg’s freshness. If the pH is below 8.9 — in a fresh egg it is closer to 8.0 — then the inner membrane tends to adhere to the albumen, whereas, at the figure typical after three days of refrigeration, around 9.2, the problem no longer exists. Exactly what the chemistry involved is, no one knows, though some cooks claim that salt in the cooking water helps.”

On Food and Cooking by Harold McGee, Chapter 2: Eggs

Joy, the egg lady says that to peel, the eggs must be 10 days old. The mangled egg above was one of three I kept for 10 days. Well there you go. But I hadn’t read Harold McGee and didn’t salt the water. Maybe that works.

In the meantime, I wanted a hard-boiled egg for breakfast to go with leftover broccoli and fresh cheese curd. As I was standing at the counter with an egg in front of me, I remembered making a “poached egg” in the microwave.
I didn’t much like that, and haven’t “poached” an egg that way since. But what if I left the egg in the microwave longer? Say 35 seconds. The worst that can happen is it will explode and make a mess. I did it.

hard-microwaved egg

eating the hard egg with cheese curd and broccoli

It looks like a hard-boiled egg, except for the shape — which is weird — and tastes like a hard-boiled egg. That’s good to know. But you can’t cut it into wedges or slices like a regular egg-shaped egg. I have a gadget for that. It also has a pricker to prick the egg bottom.

the pricker is the round thing at the bottom of the egg tool…. place the bottom of the egg there and press down gently, one can hear the shell being pierced.

“Carefully piercing the air cell with a pin may allow some of the cooking water to leak between the membranes and so ease their separation from the egg… Modern Science generally agrees with the empirically derived advice given by the 14th -century Menagier de Paris: ‘Item, whether they be soft or hard, as soon as they are cooked put them in cold water: they will be easier to peel.’”

ibid.

My cooking method is to pierce the bottoms of the eggs, cover the eggs with cold water in a saucepan and cook over high heat, covered, until the water just boils (about 5 minutes in San Francisco, 6 minutes in nearly mile-high Reno). Set the pan off the heat and let stand, covered, for 12 minutes. Plunge the eggs into ice water. Crack all the eggs and put them back in the water. Peel.

And so; my current crop of eggs is 10 days old, today. I only have two, but let’s have a go at it, incorporating my new knowledge.

eggs made and peeled “by the book”

Success. But not easy… never easy… look at the size of those shell peelings. Nevertheless, a good hard-boiled egg is worth some effort.