A professional pastry chef's easy recipe for the perfect hard boiled egg! You'll never need to look up how long to boil eggs again with this easy hard boiled egg recipe. Learn the trick to hard boiled eggs peeling easily every single time!
How do you determine if your method is the best? You ask around! Fortunately I work in two professional restaurant kitchens (Restaurant Marc Forgione & Peasant) and there is no shortage of opinionated chefs, cooks, and front of house staff.
Apparently, “How to Hard Boil an Egg” is an incredibly contentious topic. You would have thought I was asking about politics!
When I filmed the video, I was going through quite a hard boiled egg phase. I ate them on salads, in deviled eggs, deviled egg salad sandwiches, and as a snack with sweet relish. I’m not gross, you’re gross! ?
I used to have a delightful shortcake on the menu, and I would cut hard boiled egg yolks in with the dry ingredients to keep it tender. (Ok, now I have shortcake on the brain...!) In any given week I had to hard boil 3 flats of eggs. What the heck are flats of eggs? That is a cool industry term for 3 dozen! ? As you would imagine, I got pretty good at hard boiling the perfect egg!
Ok, it would seem I'm pretty passionate about this topic, so without further ado, I give you ?
Tips for Hard Boiled Egg Success
- Start with cold water [I know! Other chefs say only add it to hot water because starting in cold water coagulates the protein too early! Goodness. I said it was heated. ?] I start with cold water because then I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that my eggs are perfectly cooked at 10 minutes.
- Umm size matters ? This recipe is for large eggs. Not medium eggs, and, no, I don’t know how long those take to cook, because who buys medium eggs?! XL eggs take 11 minutes. ?
- The secret to the easy peel is distilled white vinegar. I inadvertently learned this from my Mom because whenever we dyed Easter eggs we added white vinegar. I think it was for the colors, but I noticed in retrospect that they were *always* easier to peel than others.
- Don’t skip the ice bath. ? Shocking the eggs in ice water stops the cooking and shrinks the egg away from the outer membrane to make it easier to peel.
- If you get stuck while peeling, peel under the cold ice water. It might hurt your hands but the water helps loosen the aforementioned membrane.
- A few other fun egg facts: old eggs are harder to peel; white eggs are easier to peel, probably because the shell is thinner; and farm fresh eggs are damn hard to peel! ?
How to Hard Boil an Egg
Ingredients
- 12 eggs
- 1 qt Cold water (to cover eggs)
- 2 tablespoon Distilled white vinegar (approximately 2 Tablespoons for each quart of water)
- Ice
Instructions
- Put the eggs in a pot, create a single layer on the bottom
- Fill the pot up with cold water just until it covers the eggs
- Pour in around 2 tablespoons of distilled white vinegar (this will make the eggs easy to peel, won't make the eggs taste like vinegar)
- Bring water to a boil on high heat
- As soon as you have a consistent boil, set a timer for 10 minutes (no more!)
- Gather some ice in a big bowl (no need to add water yet)
- Use a slotted spoon to gentle take the eggs out of the pot, and put them in the bowl of ice. You want the eggs to be encapsulated in the ice water so they cool down quickly.
- Let them cool (about 15 minutes), and peel! Or peel them warm! They are actually easier to peel.
Video Instructions
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