Boiled Eggs

 

Boiled eggs

I have offered a couple of blogs sharing recipes centered around my lack of kitchen skills (and my lack of interest in developing kitchen skills.) But there is more to my cooking story.

My mother was a good southern cook and shared her knowledge of deep frying all meat and adding bacon grease to all vegetables. But she never taught me how to boil eggs.

I thought she did. I boiled a lot of eggs. (Remember, I lived on a farm). I filled a pot with water, added eggs, and boiled until I decided it had probably been 12 minutes (I had some cultural memory that eggs take 12 minutes). Sometimes I forgot them until all the water boiled away and I heard the eggs cracking.

In our retirement togetherness, Martin was watching me boil eggs and commented that he did it differently. In an attempt to redeem myself, I did some research only to find he was closer to correct that I was (a face-saving way to say he was right, and I was wrong.)

I watched an instructional video... Put eggs in pot, cover with water, bring to a boil, cover with lid, turn off heat, wait 12 minutes, immerse in cold water so the residual heat doesn’t overcook the eggs.

Overcook hard-boiled eggs? How would you know that hard boiled eggs are too hard boiled?

The color. It seems that the greenish rim around the yolk indicates over boiled. Over cooked. Overdone.

Now I assumed this was a new scientific discovery, but I was reading a 1992 novel in which private investigator Kinsey Milhone was describing the color of a suspect’s house. She said it was the shade of green you see around the yolk of a boiled egg that was overcooked.

Another search produced an article from “Entertainment Times” in 2019 with the following warning.

“When you boil eggs, hydrogen sulphide - a toxic gas is released in the whites of the egg. This happens especially when you overboil the eggs. If you have noticed, overcooked eggs have a green coating on their yolk, which is a signal that you should not eat them.”

The article does go on to say nobody has ever died from the toxic eggs, but it still makes me wonder if I have left trails of sick people behind me when I brought the deviled eggs for Thanksgiving.

I bemoaned my egg ignorance at a family gathering and Cousin Julie laughed and said she had the same problem. She now uses her instant pot or her air fryer. With the fryer she puts the eggs in at 270 for 15 minutes, takes them out with tongs and drops them in ice water for easy peeling.

And Jennifer showed me how to use a small egg-cooker which boils 6 at a time.

I now make non-toxic boiled eggs at least twice a week. And I take delight in the perfect yellow yolks.

 

NOTE – Stephanie does the boiled eggs at our family dinners. Full disclosure - She said she learned to boil eggs from Grandma Hinshaw.