The Good Egg

The good egg - soft or hard cooked in the shell - ought to be the simplest thing in the world: boil water, add an egg, count down the desired number of minutes, remove egg, eat. Simple, right?

Well, not exactly. If you've been frustrated trying to get boiled eggs to come out the way you like them, don't be too hard on yourself. There are a few secrets.

Let's start with the basics, which any cookbook will tell you: 3-5 minutes for soft cooked, 5-10 minutes for medium, 10-15 minutes for hard cooked. Now, for the stuff the cookbooks DON'T tell you:

First, take the eggs out of the refrigerator early enough so that they come to room temperature before cooking. If you didn't think of that and the troops are clambering to be fed, put them in a bowl with hot tap water for a few minutes. I'll explain why below.

Poke a hole in each egg. No, I'm not kidding. An egg has a bubble of air inside the shell, and when heated, that air expands and often results in a cracked egg. You can solve that problem by piercing the rounded end of each egg before cooking. I use a large safety pin, which gives my thumb something to push against when slowly piercing the shell. It's easier than you might expect. Hold the egg securely in your off hand and apply slow steady pressure with the point of the pin. Now the air can escape into the hot water, sometimes with a little thread of albumin, but that hardly makes any difference.

Next, before putting the eggs into the boiling water, add a glug of vinegar and a good pinch of salt. If you like to measure, a glug might be a tablespoon and a good pinch anywhere from a quarter to half a teaspoon, depending on how much water you have in your pot. The salt, I'm told, makes the water boil at a higher temperature, and the vinegar acts on the eggshells to prevent cracking. But don't quote me as gospel.

When you put the eggs into the water, reduce the heat. This might seem counter-intuitive, since the water stopped boiling as soon as you dropped the eggs into it, and you might think you should raise the heat to bring it back to a boil. No. The water should be just below boiling while the eggs cook. So now you know why it's good not to have the eggs icy cold from the fridge when they go into the water.

Almost done. Time your eggs as you like them, then, when the egg timer rings, remove the eggs from the pot with a slotted spoon and drop them gently into a bowl of cold water. That stops the cooking and insures your 4-minute eggs don't arrive at the table hard boiled.

There you go. By the way, the photos in this article were found on the Internet - I didn't really cook hundreds of eggs for this article! Now, if you have a dependable method for peeling hard-cooked eggs - without the shells sticking to them like chipped nail polish - be a good egg and let the rest of us in on the secret.