Knowledge Base > Char Nolan - Ask Me Anything (Office Hours)
Char Nolan - Ask Me Anything (Office Hours)
This event was on
Tuesday, May 30, 2023 at 11:00 am Pacific, 2:00 pm Eastern
Join Chef Char Nolan in her virtual office as she welcomes all of your questions. This event was created for you and we encourage you to ask anything – from cooking techniques to cou… Read More.
Question:
I am having a very hard time with peeling hard boiled eggs! No matter what I try, the shells stick, sometimes when they break while I’m peeling they take a whole layer off so I’m left with an egg half its size that looks awful! ?
— Pamela Jackson
Answer:
I'm gonna refer to Jacque, this one because he is really the expert with eggs. Um, and what he actually says is you want to bring your water up to a boil, and then you wanna put your eggs inside of it. Now, if you're looking for a softer center, you wanna boil it for about seven minutes. If you're looking for a harder center, much like we use in America for the deviled eggs, it won't be about 10 minutes. Now, after doing that, you're gonna remove the egg and put it into an ice bath. Now, one trick that Jacques does that you don't see a lot of people do, is you'll actually take a push pin and push the pin onto the end, end of the egg. That's like, kind of comes to the narrower part. Push the pin into the egg to create a small hole so any air that's on the inside will come out and it'll actually make the skin of the egg on the inside contract a little better. So it won't hold in as much. I've known a lot of people that have used this, but I've also not used it as much myself. But it is a wonderful trick that Jacque actually shows to be able to make sure that it doesn't stick. Now, after cooking your eggs, no matter how, what technique you're actually going to use, um, just dump your eggs into, uh, an ice bath. Um, very gently, of course, but put your eggs into the ice bath, let them sit to cool down, and then afterward you'll be able to peel them. Jock actually says it's best to peel eggs under water. So under cold water in the tap, you can just put it right under and be able to peel those. You can just crack it a little bit in your eggs. And the, the skin should, and the peel should come right off of the outside. Now, there are other some there. Now there are some other home ideas that I've learned over the years. My grandmother actually used to put vinegar just a, about a tablespoon of vinegar into the boiling water. And what that actually does is it starts to break down some of the shell on the inside, um, as you're cooking it. So it makes it a little easier to peel as well. But either way, you do wanna make sure that you're cooling down the eggs directly after cooking in an ice bath to be able to make sure that that shell is coming off as easy as possible. I hope that helps Pamela,
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