The Food Lab: Perfect Boiled Eggs
Note: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt (of Good Eater) brought his analytical cooking expertise to us last week in his first installment of The Burger Lab. This week he starts another bi-weekly column, The Food Lab, dedicated to unraveling the science of cooking. Today, learn about what happens under the shell when boiling eggs and how to make the perfect soft and hard boiled eggs.
Perfect Boiled Eggs Recipe
Want to go straight to the kitchen? Here's the recipe for Perfect Boiled Eggs.
I'd like to apologize in advance for the shameless, horrible egg puns that I'm inevitably going to shell out over the course of this story.
For the very first installment of The Food Lab, I thought I'd tackle one of the simplest, yet most vexing everyday challenges of the home kitchen: perfectly boiling an egg.
Nearly every basic cookbook offers conflicting techniques on how it should be done—start the egg in cold water, or gently lower it into boiling water; add vinegar to the water to lower its pH, or add baking soda to the water to raise it; cover the pot, don't cover the pot; use old eggs, or use new eggs, and on and on—but very few offer evidence as to why any one of these techniques should work any better than your average old wives' tale. Apparently, boiling is not...ahem...an eggs-act science.
The first few of these fairy tales were easy to banish with some easy tests.
What Factors Matter When Boiling Eggs?
Age of the Eggs
"Old eggs are for boiling, fresh eggs are for frying," is the old chestnut. Well, it's true...to a degree. As anyone who's had fresh-from the hen eggs will tell you, they do fry up beautifully, giving you tall, tall yolks, and tight whites, and trying to peel a very freshly laid boiled egg is difficult—the inner membrane of the shell has a tendency to stick to the white, giving the peeled egg a pockmarked appearance. But these differences disappear within a few days after the egg has been laid. Since eggs in the supermarket can spend up to 30 days before they even hit the shelf, followed by a further 30 days before they hit their expiration date, the point is pretty much moot. So long as you don't keep your own chickens, you can boil eggs with impunity.
