Gently rolling the cooked egg on a cutting board (or another hard surface) with the palm of your hand makes lots of cracks in the shell, which supposedly helps detach the membrane from the egg white. Pricking holes in the egg was a pain, and the egg had a faint soapy taste. Maybe I needed to use more than just a sprinkle of baking soda? Even if adding more helped, though, I still wouldn’t do this. So I used a pin to prick tiny holes in the top and bottom of the egg to make sure the baking soda could get inside ASAP. ![]() Boil eggs with baking sodaīaking soda is alkaline, so adding a sprinkle to your cooking water will raise the pH of the water, which, theoretically, will raise the pH of your egg and make it easier to peel.īut for this to actually work, the baking soda would need to pass through the eggshell and come in contact with the egg white before the proteins started to coagulate, Davies said. The verdict: Not that helpful if you’re buying eggs from the supermarket but could have an impact if you’re buying super-fresh eggs. The problem is, there’s no official definition of “old.” My eggs were packed 3 weeks before I brought them home, and they weren’t any easier or harder to peel than other supermarket eggs I’d bought in the past.īut if you buy very fresh eggs from the farmers market (or you keep chickens), it might be worth seeing if letting them sit for at least a few days makes for easier peeling. So eggs packed on January 1 would say 001, eggs packed on February 1 would say 032, etc.) (Look for the three-digit lot number, which will list a consecutive day of the year. If you’re buying them from the supermarket, you can check the carton to see when the eggs were actually packed. Older eggs have a higher pH than fresher ones, which makes them less sticky. The verdict: This worked just as well as dropping eggs into boiling water: I hit a couple of snags, but the shells mostly slid off. Just as I had after boiling, I plunged the cooked eggs into ice water for a few minutes to help them cool down. This was the other cooking method Davies recommended, so I had high hopes. Supposedly this also makes it harder for the egg whites to get too hot and become ultra-sticky. It might’ve been even better if I’d chilled the eggs longer, but in the interest of time, it was a trade-off I was willing to make. The verdict: This wasn’t totally foolproof, but it nixed about 95 percent of my peeling problems. Fortunately, chilling the eggs for just a couple of minutes worked well enough. Davies suggested letting my eggs sit in the ice water bath for a full 15 minutes, but I didn’t have time to wait that long. I had always started my eggs in cold water, so this made a big difference. Plunging the eggs into an ice-water bath once they’re done stops the cooking quickly, further preventing the sticky situation. This seems to make it harder for them to stick to the shell, according to Cathy Davies, PhD, a food scientist and consultant in the food industry. That’s because adding eggs directly to hot water helps them cook faster and keeps the egg whites from reaching too high a temperature. Start hot, finish coldĬarefully dropping an egg into a pot of boiling water instead of starting it in cold water is touted as the best route to easy-peel eggs. To achieve a boiled egg that slips happily out of its shell, one of two things needs to happen: You need to either find a way to reduce the stickiness of the egg white (which makes the egg stick to the membrane that lines the shell) or find a way to raise the pH of your egg.įirst, here are the methods that got the job done… and the ones that were a complete waste of my time. And some of them are downright ridiculous. ![]() If you’ve ever tried to solve the unpeelable-egg problem, you probably already know that the internet is chockablock with potential solutions.
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