This isn’t meant to make a egg easier to peel (IIRC that tends to come down to the freshness of the egg).
It’s meant to get rid of the air gap in the egg so your eggs don’t have the divot. And it can help prevent them from cracking while cooking if you’re dropping them into boiling water (especially straight from the fridge).
Why? You’re about to boil and sterilize the entire egg.
This is to stop them from over cooking. It also means your fingers won’t get burned if you peel them right away.
At this point the innernet’s obsession with making eggs easier to peel is only half as pointless stuff like this. If it’s so boring and foolish why even try it none the less write something about it.
Ever since I found about the egg setting on my pressure cooker, I’ve not looked for any other ways to hard boil eggs. I set eggs in, I close the lit, I hit a button, I walk away. It beeps and I come back to eggs which I can just normally refridgerate. No poking, no ice bath dunking, no (other) special tools, etc. I’ve done it with fresh eggs and eggs on their last legs. No problems at all.
I don’t care how it’s done, but I’m just gald that pealing no longer take forever and is such a mess. If I can get a divot free egg, I may try this technique if I need pretty eggs to model something–like the Ramen party.
Did you though? You boiled the egg; wouldn’t that have sterilized it even if it had gotten something nasty from the pushpin? I’d say you chose to sterilize it.
EDIT: @allenk already said this. Well, right on, @allenk!
I see you’ve anticipated me. (I’m starting to think I have to read what other people have said before spewing my own verbiage. What is this world coming to?!)
Yes. Gently into hard-boiling water. Wait (18 mins here at 7500’). Into cold tap with maybe some ice. Peel. Mix with mustard, worstechestershire, maybe some mayo. Top with topping of choice. Eat nearly the whole dozen eggs. Get banished from house and workplace for at least 24h.
(or maybe the last few steps are a personal problem)
and yes, I do this since I boil eggs, not with an eierstecher, but just with a prick; so did my ancestors before me, and its not tradition, its practical, so a poked egg will not break while cooked, thats the whole point about this well-known technique. even when its stated in the above article that it will have no effect at all, I can assure you it has.
also, you dont have to sterilise the prick beforehand, since the egg gets boiled anyway?!?
For reasons that are irrational and difficult to adequately explain, I’ve always deliberately avoided specialised cooking equipment. So a device that’s only functions is to puncture an egg is something that fills me with unease.
Although perversely, as a maker with a workshop full of esoteric single purpose tools I’m delighted to learn that such a device exists and can appreciate the efficiency of its design. So thanks @elizk for that.
In my kitchen I have two cast iron saucepans, a heavy frying pan, a lasagna dish and a couple of stirrers and flippers about 5 nylon chopping boards and about 5 good sharp knives, all the same.
It’s not that I don’t like food, or can’t cook. I just have this irrational fear that I’ll starve to death in an austere environment because I’ve become dependent on a piece of equipment that cuts carrots and cucumbers into wobbly shaped slices.
I’ve always heard this, but never noticed any difference with eggs of any age, including fresh and older from the farm/backyard unwashed. The only thing I’ve discovered that makes peeling consistently easy is dropping into boiling water and then quenching with cold (and always peeling while warm).
I wonder if this is more true in places outside of the US where eggs tend to be unwashed and stored at room temp. To be legally sold here they must be washed and refrigerated, which removes the protective covering the hen adds. This prevents the loss of moisture from the interior and migration of bacteria into the shell (hence refrigeration requirements).
My experience (in Ireland) is similar to yours. I don’t notice a difference between regular store bought, free-range store bought or ‘home-made’ eggs and I never found freshness to be a consideration.
I just boil them 'til they’re hard, run them under the cold tap and peel them.
WTF? German households usually have a device specifically constructed to poke a tiny hole into an egg shell. You can use a pushpin, or a needle, but the device specifically made for the purpose is better. And I would never even dream of boling, or steaming, a whole egg without making a little hole in the shell, on the end where the air bubble is.
Why would anyone NOT make this little hole and suffer the consequences?
Even softboiled or poached in the shell with a sous vide circulator.
It comes through on testing with washed US eggs as well as unwashed eggs in Europe and the US.
Thing is packaged eggs in the US are often stored for up to 30 days before packaging and distribution. So you’re a lot less likely to run into eggs that are fresh enough to cause a major, consistent issue at supermarkets. And the expo date isn’t a particularly reliable guage for freshness.
We get our eggs locally, and they’re typically a week or less old. They do not peel cleanly when new, regardless of method.
I try to use supermarket eggs, or cartons I’ve had for a while when I rarely hard boil eggs. Which is usually only for devilled eggs.
I don’t find there’s any consistent way to prevent sticky peels every time. Aside from not over cooking things. Starting with boiling water and rinsing them to cool does that best so it’s the way I tend to go.
And I think in all the online chatter on the subject recently that’s about as firm a take away as you can get. Every day or so I see some one “testing” a given method and “proving” or “debunking” it based on whether that one batch was easy to peel or not.
“Easy to peel” eggs is just an easy click bait article to write, in the “one weird trick” model. It’s never how to boil eggs properly, without over cooking them. It’s always about the peeling.
You make a bunch of good points here. We used to have laying hens, and an abundance of eggs, and all of the “tricks” you read about don’t really make a difference when you’re working with super fresh eggs.
Makes me think maybe in the past, hard boiling eggs was kind of a last ditch effort to keep them edible when they weren’t fresh enough for omelets or other more delicate things?
This doesn’t really carry over to all the baking uses, but it got me thinking…
It’s definitely true for the eggs from the chickens in my back yard, for over a decade, from different chicken breeds (mostly hybrid).
I just kept them in two batches: less than a week old for frying and baking and more than a week old for peeling. No antibiotics, no refrigeration (no Salmonella either - knocking on wood here).
Off topic - Here is one of Flippie’s last eggs before she went into menopause. She’s a Dutch Bantham at the ripe old age of eight. Ever wondered what a menopausal egg looks like? No yolk.
