Originally published at: J. Kenji López-Alt shows how to cook perfect boiled eggs | Boing Boing
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I used to do it that way, but now I put a quarter cup of water in the pressure cooker, put in the egg rack, set the eggs in the rack, close it, and set it to egg. Then I walk away until I hear it vent. Perfect eggs every time and not a single shell has stuck to dozens of eggs of various ages. I’m not going back.
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Boneless chicken dinner.
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Our method is to load up the big plastic chicken, fill the tray with water, plug it in until it makes a hideous artificial electric chicken sound, unplug and let rest for 5 minutes.
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Except you go online to look up Instapot recipes for hard-boiled eggs and find a bunch of them, ALL with different times.
The perfect egg? 4 minutes! No, 8 minutes!!
Wait a minute…how can two recipes for the same thing be literally double the cooking time as the other??
So just like with the regular cooking method, you need to try out 13 different recipes until you find the one that is ACTUALLY correct. SMDH
Want a laugh, look up corned beef recipes for instapot and be amazed at how much the cooking time varies. 30 minutes? 90? 120? They’re all wrong and right at the same time.
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No need for that much water. One centimeter works fine if you cover the pot and steam them. 7 minutes for soft boiled, 12 for hard boiled.
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Kenji is a national treasure. I especially appreciate the first person perspective he shoots in. It give a really great sense of his process both in prep and at the range. The other killer detail is that he’s cooking in an actual kitchen with consumer-grade equipment except for his “late night” snacks at Wursthall (I think I have nearly the same range, but with the dual-ring power burner🤘🏼). A professional kitchen will give completely different results. If I’m looking for an authoritative how-to on a recipe I’m trying, it’s straight to Kenji and/or Serious Eats, every time.
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Please be aware that these are directions for SEA LEVEL, where water boils at 212°F. At higher altitudes the boiling point of water is lower, requiring longer cooking times. These directions would fail miserably in Santa Fe, or even Denver. A method that works regardless of altitude is to put a plastic egg timer in with the eggs. The egg-shaped timer changes color as the eggs cook, and the color change gradually penetrates the timer. The top is calibrated to show the degree of hardness.
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I don’t have a recipe. My cooker has an eggs setting. I use that.
I don’t think you could have one recipe for eggs that works will all different pressure cookers. They all have different heating profiles, different pressure settings, etc. If you had control over all of those aspects of the cooking process, then you could have one recipe, but I’ve not seen a pressure cooker that allows that. So you have to have a recipe per cooker. Mine comes with it built in and it works perfectly.
Also, cooking eggs for a hard center is pretty forgiving. There’s a pretty wide range of ‘done’ between undone and overdone.
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That’s a good point. I am now curious how pressure cookers sense/regulate pressure in their vessles. If they go by absolute pressure, they would be great for higher altitudes, but I fear the pressure vessle would have to be much stronger than the sea level models to withstand the pressure differential. Possibly an untapped market.
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Tangentially, I don’t get some people’s excitement about sous-vide cooked eggs, which some folks called “perfectly cooked eggs”. The yolk solidifies at a lower temperature than the white, so you’ll get a well-cooked yolk (awesome!) but gooey white (yuck).
So in my experience you actually want traditionally-cooked eggs, where the temperature gradient between the hot outside boiling water and the cold core means the yolk cooks after the white, so both get the right consistency if you time it right.
Can anyone tell me if I misunderstood how people are sous-viding eggs, and what they expect out of it?
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Catch 'em young and old with Oyakodon. Sooooo tasty:
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Or make Ajitama Tamago (aka ramen eggs)
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Texture, of both the whites and the yolk, is sensitive to very small differences in temperature.
I’d love a simple way to get a 63.5 degree yolk with fully cooked whites. I’ve tried a few combinations of boil/shock/sous-vide and sous-vide then boil, but I haven’t cracked it yet.
Luckily the mistakes are still delicious.
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I appreciate his recipes, but the POV camera gives me migraines.
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As a happy sous vide cooker, I can say that cooking eggs that way does not appeal to me for the reasons you mention. If you cook the eggs long enough for the white to harden, the center has already hardened and you now have a hard boiled egg. Dunking eggs in boiling water seems to be the only way to get a hard white with a thin yellow.
We do use the sous vide on eggs for one application: Pasturizing. We make home made mayo and would prefer to avoid any food born illnesses that we can manage to. So, we Pasturize them. The whites get a little tiny bit cloudy, but they work fine to make mayo.
Maybe we’re all wrong.
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I’ve never understood the people who call soft cooking an egg, in its shell, via sous vide poaching the egg. Poaching by definition requires the egg to be out of its shell. I suppose you could crack the egg into a sealable container and drop that into the water bath, but it really seems like too much work.
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@frauenfelder If you like this (and other) YouTube channels, then what’s with all these AIR.TV videos we’ve been seeing lately? Unlike YT vids, they have no keyboard controls, and quite frankly are a PITA.
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There’s already a topic for that.
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Perfect eggs…
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