J. Kenji López-Alt shows how to cook perfect boiled eggs

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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Why worry about rolling in the egg down the slope of a wok when you can simply lower them into the boiling water with a table spoon? This is the way I learned to do it from my family.
One thing he doesn’t mention is peeling them under water. I have found that to be effective to prevent the shell from sticking, but I haven’t done any scientific experiments to prove it.

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“T1000, from the maker of rollie.”

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I steam my eggs. Boil an inch of water in the bottom of a covered pot with a steamer basket in it. Whether you add two eggs or a dozen the cooking time doesn’t change because the temperature inside the pot doesn’t change.

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I wonder about regional differences in eggs.

German here:
We use basically the same method but just with more water and even shocking the eggs under cold water to stop the protein coagulation on time.

But after 5min30sec for a regular M sized egg the white is already hard while the yellow is still liquid but not slimey. (Add 20 seconds for an L sized)

A twelve minute egg will be rock solid hard boiled with a crumbling egg yolk.

So the “time table” for desired outcome is quite different.

Genau viereinhalb Minuten. Nach Gefühl.

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My thoughts exactly. People act like cooking acts is a perfectly repeatable science, but it depends on the age & size of the eggs, your altitude, and all sorts of other variables never mentioned in videos and blog posts. You have to find what works for you in your circumstances.

None of the times listed in that video match the results I get in my kitchen with my eggs. So I have my own heuristics, like everyone else.

And I still don’t get why some people have so much trouble peeling eggs. That’s a total mystery to me.

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I’ve had issues the last few times i made boiled eggs and tried peeling them, and while i don’t make boiled eggs a ton i know what i’m doing. I’ve noticed sometimes the eggs just don’t want to separate nicely, other times it’s not an issue at all. I usually use older eggs which should separate from the shell easier but it is what it is.

+1000 on the pasturizing.

For some reason raw egg yolks jack up my GI tract, but after 2h at 130F I’m loving all of the ensuing aioli, hollandaise, caesar dressing and all of that.

Mr Lopez-Alt’s website goes into depth on time/temperature for food safety and egg texture.

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