The Best Way to Peel an Egg
The art of peeling a boiled egg is one that people seem to take quite personally. It’s an inexplicable phenomenon in which every person on planet Earth has to do it differently, and so-called fool-proof methods don’t seem to work for everyone. It’s like reaching enlightenment when you finally crack the code, when karma bestows upon you your “perfect method.” Mine is steaming a hard-boiled egg and dropping it in cold water. It peels like a dream every time. But like the sun rises every day, a new method has crossed my path: boiling eggs in oily water for easy peeling. Does it work? I grabbed a few pots to find out.
The oil-boil method in question
Since boiling eggs can vary dramatically in time, cold-start versus boiling-start, or how to cool it, egg boiling tests can quickly blow out of proportion with details. This particular method comes from Tasting Table and leaves everything up to the user except for the simple addition of oil. Simply add a tablespoon of any oil (that you don’t mind pouring down the drain later) to the pot of water, and set it to boil. Then add the eggs and boil them how you normally would. According to the post, the oil seeps through the egg’s porous shell and “separates the shell from the membrane and the egg…” If this is the case, an egg rubbed with oil to ensure even coating should do well when dropped into boiling water too.
It seems plausible, so I set up three pots of water. Each pot had water in it and was set to boil. One pot with a tablespoon of canola oil added to it would get an egg, another pot with no oil added would get an egg that I rubbed with oil, and the last pot was the control with no oil involved in the water or on the egg.
The method didn’t indicate what temperature the eggs should start at, so I used fridge-cold eggs. One egg cracked upon entering the boiling water from thermal shock. Obviously that one would peel differently than the others so I added a second one to that pot that did not crack. I boiled the eggs for nine minutes each and took them out to cool on plates.
The results
Credit: Allie Chanthorn Reinmann
The control egg. Honestly, peeling this egg was frustratingly fine. I haven’t boiled an egg…
