Boiled eggs perfected
I found the sweet spot for me: 6.5 minutes. Let the eggs come to room temperature (overnight), pierce the big end of the eggs with an egg piercer, place them gently in boiling water and after 6.5 minutes remove them with a slotted spoon to a large bowl of iced water and let them cool. The yolk has started to cook, but the center is still runny.
Hmmmm….I wonder if water hardness and the size of the egg play a role. Hard water for example should in principle have a higher boiling point; and a larger egg would seem, at least intuitively, to need more time because it has a larger internal volume. I pose these questions because at my house (using the room temperature method), a jumbo egg is soft-boiled by 4 minutes, firm but soft by 5 min., and almost hard by 6.5 minutes.
And they used to joke, “She doesn’t know how to boil an egg”. Hell, cooking an egg is one of the hardest challenges…or at least cooking it to perfection is.
Steve
25 June 2010 at 1:56 pm
P.S. And probably piercing it also plays a role in allowing it to equilibrate faster. So in principle, a smaller egg, pierced, and cooked in hard water, should cook much more quickly. In very soft water, you would expect it to take longer.
Steve
25 June 2010 at 1:58 pm