Domestic eggs are poorly cleaned what to do. Why is a boiled egg hard to peel?

For many housewives, the question is how to properly boil an egg, so that later it can be quickly and easily cleaned? This issue is especially relevant when a lot of eggs are boiled, for example, for another dish or for a large family.

The first factor that affects the speed and ease of shelling is the freshness of the product. Fresh eggs are more difficult to shell, while those that have been lying for 1-2 weeks are cleaned quickly and easily. The hardest part is peeling very fresh 2-3 day old eggs.

For hard-boiled and "pouched" recipes, it is not necessary to take fresh eggs. It is best to cook those whose freshness period is from 5-6 days. The product must be fresh only for soft-boiled cooking. However, egg peeling should not be the reason for eating expired eggs. Be sure to consider the shelf life and not risk the health and well-being of your family for a quick cleaning.

Shelf life of chicken eggs (according to GOST)

If you do not know the exact age of the egg, then you should pay attention to its weight and whether it floats when lowered into the water. Also, stale eggs rotate around the axis when they are pushed.

The second, main, factor is the cooking process itself. In most cases, the difficult cleaning process is due to the wrong egg boiling process. There are five basic secrets on how to properly cook chicken eggs so that they are well cleaned after cooking:

Boiling eggs, only taken out of their cold, is not worth it. If you want to cook an egg that is easy to peel after boiling, then you need to warm it to room temperature.
Do not put in already boiled water. That's right: lower it into a container with cold (not ice) water and put it on the stove. The liquid should be poured with a margin so that it is 2-3 cm above the top of the eggs.
Put salt in a pot of boiling water. The recommended amount is a teaspoon of salt.
Do not allow strong seething when boiling water. If the eggs begin to collide with each other and beat against the side of the pan, the fire should be reduced.
After cooking, the eggs should be transferred to a bowl of cold water or under running tap water. Cooling takes 10-12 minutes.

The result of the implementation of the above tips will be obtaining eggs that are flawless in shape: oval, without breaks and “bitten” edges, with elastic protein and evenly boiled yolk. This product is easy to clean and is great for decorating salads and stuffing.

Unusual methods to make it easier to peel a boiled egg: blowing and piercing

A complex and unusual approach to properly boiling eggs is to pre-pierce the shells of still-raw eggs. This method requires experience, caution and accuracy. The puncture is carried out with a thin sharp object: a sewing needle, an awl, the tip of a knife. The puncture is carried out on the blunt side of the egg, the depth is 1 mm. To prevent leakage, it is important not to touch the film that protects the protein.

Positive results from shell piercing are:

Easy shelling after welding;
Prevention of cracks during cooking;
Preventing the formation of dents on the surface of the protein. As can be seen in the figure, a more aesthetic option, with a puncture (left), while without punctures, the welded product has an irregular shape with a concave end.

Blowing a boiled egg will reduce the duration of its cleaning to a few seconds. The blowing algorithm is quite simple, but requires some accuracy:

A chilled egg breaks at both ends;
On each side, 0.5-1 cm of the shell is removed;
The sharp side is brought to the mouth and it is necessary to blow strongly into the hole formed.

The result is the egg slipping out of the shell, which, together with the film, will remain in the hands.

Many people do not know how to boil eggs so that they peel well. This causes some inconvenience. Our article is entirely devoted to this topic. We will tell you how to clean them well and share some tricks.

Eggs are frequent guests on any table. They are eaten boiled, fried and even raw. They are added to the dough, cutlets, cream and, of course, to a variety of salads. The popularity of eggs is explained by the fact that they are tasty, healthy and easy to prepare. Even a child is able to concoct a “gift from a chicken” for breakfast.

But not every experienced housewife knows that they are well cleaned and do not burst. As a result: a spoiled mood, an unpresentable appearance of the dish and significant protein losses sent to the trash along with the shell. To avoid this, you need to know the secrets of how to boil eggs so that they are well cleaned.

Secret number 1: the age of the egg

There are several cooking methods. The main three are soft-boiled, bagged and hard-boiled. They differ from each other primarily in the cooking time, and you should also pay attention to the freshness of the product.

Many housewives do not know how to boil fresh eggs so that they are well cleaned. And it's really difficult. Because the fresher the egg, the harder it is to peel. Experienced chefs advise when cooking hard-boiled (for salads or snacks, for example), not to chase "youth". In this case, it is better to choose eggs that are five or more days old (of course, within reasonable limits). Eggs "in the bag" also do not have to be fresh. And only when boiling soft-boiled, it is advisable to choose the most “young” product.

Determining the age of an egg is easy. The older it is, the easier it is. Therefore, it quickly floats up in the water and spins for a long time around its axis on a horizontal surface when pushed.

Secret number 2: puncture

This procedure requires some skill, but is guaranteed to protect the shell from cracks during cooking and provide easy cleaning. It is necessary to make a puncture of one millimeter from the blunt side of the egg with a needle, awl or the tip of a sharp knife. It is very important that only the shell is pierced, and the film under it is unharmed. Otherwise, the egg will leak.

Secret #3: Salt

Almost everyone loves to salt boiled eggs. But only after they get them out of the water and clean them. And they don’t know that salt is needed much earlier. Meanwhile, she is an important ally in the fight for whole, neat, perfectly cleaned eggs.

Salted water for cooking greatly facilitates the cleaning process. only works with eggs that are at least five days old. In addition, salt tends to plug the small cracks that sometimes occur in the shell, thus preventing the protein from escaping. About how much it is needed, and what is the cooking algorithm - below.

Secret #4: Hard Mode

Boiling eggs should not be treated as something very simple and arbitrary. Like, they won’t come out of the water raw anyway, so why worry? A lot depends on the temperature of the water and its quantity, the eggs themselves, the power of the fire and the cooking time. So, for example, eggs that have been in boiling water for about an hour are strictly forbidden to eat - this seriously threatens health. Undercooked ones are not suitable for salad, and temperature imbalance can negate all undertakings, damaging the shell ahead of time.

The action plan is:

Having chosen eggs that are suitable for freshness, you need to get them out of the refrigerator and wait until they warm up to room temperature. It is undesirable to cook cold.
Eggs are placed in a small saucepan or ladle - tightly to each other, so that during cooking they do not wear back and forth. This is necessary so that they do not crack from impacts.
Next, pour half a tablespoon of ordinary
The next step is water. It should be cold, but not icy. And in such quantity to cover the eggs by two centimeters.
The fire is first made large, and after boiling it is reduced to medium. Soft-boiled eggs are boiled for 3-4 minutes, "in a bag" - 4-9 minutes, and hard-boiled - 9-15 minutes.
Ready-made take out with a spoon and quickly immerse in cold water. As it warms up, you need to change it several times. Or you can cool the eggs under a tap.
After five minutes of cooling, you can begin the cleaning process.

Now you know how to boil eggs so that they peel well. Not so difficult if you follow the above sequence of actions. These simple tips will come in handy for any hostess. We wish you to please yourself and your loved ones with delicious dishes and egg salads.

Sometimes the unpretentious procedure for releasing eggs from the shell becomes a real culinary test, annoying even experienced housewives: then almost all the protein is removed along with the shells, then the film clings to the fingers, then the shell cracks unevenly, making it possible to peel the egg only in small areas. All this is long and tedious. All this can be applied when you have a car of time in stock.

And in the event that the guests are on the doorstep and ordered your signature dish: or a salad, the main ingredient of which is a boiled egg? Or rather, a lot of eggs ...

Eggs, so that they look neat, and take a little time, and do not have time to spoil the nerves? There are ways!

Rules

In order to remove the shell from the egg without excesses, you must first cook it correctly:

For cooking, take eggs that are not the first freshness - you can use the day before yesterday, you can use them a week ago - in such specimens, the protein no longer clings to the shell so much and moves away from it evenly and easily.
Salt and vinegar can be added to the water where the eggs are boiled to prevent cracking of the shell and leakage of protein.
Boiled eggs need to arrange a "contrast shower" - dipping them in cold water immediately after being removed from boiling water.

Quick cleaning methods

There are several ways to quickly peel eggs, each of them is ingeniously simple and affordable.

All of them are based on the principle of lightning-fast release of eggs from the shell and take no more than seven seconds of time (based on one egg).

Some of them are so exciting that children perceive egg cleaning as a game. Therefore, mothers use this process in order to attract children to help in the kitchen.

Method one - "blowing"

If time is running out, and a couple of dozen ready-made, but unpeeled ingredients in the shell are waiting in the kitchen, if you have no idea how to quickly peel an egg (even one!), Learn this method and entrust the process to the kids: believe me, they will do it and will be very satisfied.

After tapping the tops on something hard, make two holes in the egg - from the blunt and sharp ends.
The diameter of the "holes" should not be too large, 1 cm will be enough.
Putting the egg with a sharp base to your lips, blow as hard as possible - the egg will pop out of the shell through the opposite hole. Hold it with your hand, catch it so that it does not fly far.

Method two, elegant

This technique was presented to the world by the British. Scrupulous even in the smallest detail, punctual to the second when you need to sit down for breakfast on time, they know perfectly well how to quickly peel eggs: you need to lightly press on the shell from all sides so that it breaks, then insert a teaspoon under it and use it to quickly peel egg.

Method three: egg, water, glass

Wasting no time thinking about put it in an ordinary glass (preferably with strong walls), fill it with cold water, cover the top of the glass with your palm and shake the container several times. After such gestures, it remains only to remove the egg that has been freed from the shell.

The method is very convenient and fast, leaving not the slightest fragment of the shell on the “body” of the egg.

Method four: roll the egg

Another way from the elementary class. It consists in cracking and separating the shell in the process of rolling the egg on a hard horizontal surface - for example, or on a countertop.

Rolling the egg, with the palm of your hand, you need to lightly press on the shell so that it cracks and moves away.

How to quickly clean quail eggs

These miniature specimens, obtained from small birds, turn out to be much stronger than chicken ones and do not fit into the general theme of “How to quickly peel eggs”, introducing nuances into the standard process.

The shell in quail eggs comes off a bit tight, cleaning them is quite problematic and takes a very long time.

But even in this case, the hostesses have in store a way to quickly clean it. True, the whole process will take at least three hours, but the cleaning procedure itself should take place quickly.

Make a solution of 9% vinegar (one part) and cold water (two parts), put the eggs in it for three to four hours, and calmly go about your business.

In the allotted time, the shell should, if not completely dissolve in vinegar, then noticeably soften. It remains only to remove its remains and rinse the eggs under running cold water.

Famous American chef, culinary blogger and writer Kenji Lopez-Alt (Kenji Lopez-Alt), being a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, often makes scientific and gastronomic experiments. One of them was about boiling eggs.

Over the past few years, I have boiled thousands and thousands of eggs. And believe me, there is no one hundred percent reliable method. However, old science increases the chances of success. If you listen to its laws, you can get an easy-to-peel hard-boiled egg with a well-boiled yolk and delicious protein.
Kenji Lopez-Alt, chef, food blogger, writer

Degree of freshness

You have probably heard from mothers and grandmothers that stale eggs are better cleaned.

It takes a lot of patience to peel a fresh hard-boiled egg.

The "age" of eggs does matter, but only if they are very, very fresh, literally from under the chicken. If you buy eggs from farmers or keep chickens yourself and don't want to struggle with cleaning the eggs, then let them sit in the refrigerator for a couple of weeks.

If you buy eggs in a supermarket, then there is not much point in waiting. While they are packaged at the poultry farm and transported to retail outlets, enough time will pass - the eggs will have time to "grow old". In addition, for the final result, it is not the expiration date that is much more important, but.

What kind of water to put

Most residents of megacities have eggs in the refrigerator and boil them immediately, as soon as they take them out, since there is no time to wait until they warm up at room temperature. Usually we just put them in a saucepan, fill them with cold water and send them to the stove. And that is why part of the protein then remains on the shell.

To make eggs quick and easy to peel, dip them in already boiling water.

Even if you take two or three week old eggs and boil them in cold water, half of them will not peel well. The following picture clearly demonstrates the advantages of a "hot start" over a cold one.

According to Kenji, it's like with steaks: if you put a piece of meat in a cold frying pan and heat it slowly, the process of blood clotting will begin and the juice that should be released, soaking the meat, will remain inside. Heated together with water, the egg white cooks slowly and firmly adheres to the shell membrane.

So, "hot start" provides easy cleaning of eggs. But, alas, there is a flip side to the coin. When you boil eggs in cold water and over low heat, the yolk remains in the center, as expected; when you throw eggs into boiling boiling water, they spin and flounder. As a result, when you cut a boiled egg, you may find that the yolk is uneven and, to put it mildly, asymmetrically located.

The way out is steam cooking - in an electric egg cooker or in a saucepan on a special grill. This makes it easier to control the thermal processes inside the egg.

Take a look at this photo. There are eight eggs on it: the first was boiled for one minute, the second for three, the third for five, and so on.

Let's see what happens to an egg when it's in the pot and starts to boil. First, let's look at how proteins react to an increase in temperature.

0–60 °С. Liquid protein is slowly heated.
60 °C. Some of the proteins, called glycoproteins, begin to bind to each other, forming a matrix. The protein acquires a white-milky color and a jelly-like consistency (in the picture above - an egg after a three-minute boil).
68 °С. Egg white glycoproteins are formed: it is no longer transparent, quite dense, but still a bit like jelly (see egg after five minutes of boiling).
82 °С. Ovalbumin is released - this is the main protein of egg white, due to which it becomes snow-white and elastic (see eggs after seven and nine minutes of cooking).
82 °С and more. The higher the temperature, the stronger the protein bonds. And the longer the cooking time, the drier and harder, like rubber, the protein becomes.

Yolks have a slightly different set of temperatures.

63 °C. The yolks thicken and begin to cook.
70 °С. The yolks have hardened, but they are still tender and bright yellow.
77 °С. The yolks turn pale and become crumbly.
77 °С and more. The yolks begin to dry, their texture resembles chalk. The sulfur contained in the protein reacts with the iron in the yolk - iron sulfide is released, which slightly stains the yolk. Look at the eggs that were boiled for 11 and 15 minutes: a characteristic gray-green rim formed between the yolk and protein.

Thus, in order to get hard-boiled, with an elastic protein and a delicate yolk, which will be perfectly cleaned at the same time, you need to run it into boiling water, and after 30 seconds, when the boil is quiet again, reduce the heat and cook for another 10 minutes. In the first half minute, the whites will harden and turn white, and in the remaining time, the yolks will cook at the right temperature.

We figured out the temperature and time, but what about the fact that eggs sometimes crack and leak during cooking?

Steam and oven

When cooking the old fashioned way, in cold or hot water, such incidents, alas, are not uncommon. Ugly cracked and leaking eggs usually go to salads and other dishes where fine cutting is needed. After all, you can’t serve them to the table and you can’t paint them.

Marriage can be avoided by steaming eggs or in the oven. But even here there are nuances.

For a couple

The softest and most practical way to cook hard boiled eggs

Pour water into the pan to the level of one and a half centimeters, put a special grate on the bottom. When the water boils, put the desired number of eggs and turn on the timer for 11 minutes. When steamed, the proteins are slightly stiffer than when boiled, but not rubbery.

Multicooker or steamer

Many housewives have adapted to cook or double boiler. At the same time, they write on culinary forums that eggs boiled in them literally jump out of their shells themselves, and their yolks do not turn green.

Cooking eggs in a slow cooker

Usually they write that a hard-boiled egg is cooked in a slow cooker for 10 minutes. But in practice, a lot depends on the model and power of the device, the cooking mode, the amount of water poured into the bowl. To determine the ideal ratio of all parameters, sometimes you have to lime more than a dozen eggs.

In addition, when cooking eggs in a slow cooker and double boiler, in addition to temperature, pressure affects the result. If during normal cooking in water or steam it is not so important whether the egg will cook for 10 or 11 minutes, then in the case of a slow cooker (steamer), every second matters.

Compare: in the picture below, eggs that were cooked in a double boiler for five, six and seven minutes.

At the fifth minute, the yolk is still liquid, at the sixth - the very thing, tender, bright yellow, and at the seventh - already loose, a greenish shell has formed.

Oven

This is a popular way of cooking hard boiled eggs, which has a number of advantages. Firstly, it is good when you need a lot of boiled eggs at once. Secondly, the eggs will not beat against each other.

Why is the egg not peeled? The answer to this question lies in the realm of conjecture and conjecture. Here it is: very fresh eggs, which are very few days old, are poorly cleaned. However, no scientific explanation of why this happens was not found by the author of the article.

All advice on facilitating cleansing work is also the fruit of the author's near-scientific research. If some advice helps someone - great, if not - well, the author did not claim to be the ultimate truth.

Tip #1: For a quick cool down, many people put hot eggs under cold running water. If the integrity of the shell is violated, that is, it cracks a little, then water will get between it and the protein, and it will be easier to clean the egg.

Tip number 2. Before lowering the egg into the water, you can make a shallow (a couple of millimeters) puncture with a needle from the side of the air cushion.

About the egg only facts

According to freshness, eggs are divided into dietary and table eggs. If the egg was laid by a chicken no later than seven days ago - the egg is dietary, a week after its appearance, the egg goes into the category of canteens.

If the freshness of an egg is more important to you than the ease of cleaning it, then here are a few tricks to distinguish a fresh egg from an old one:

- a fresh egg has a hard shell, if the shell is soft - the egg is definitely rotten;

- a fresh egg shines through in the sun, that is, inside it you can see the yolk;

- a fresh egg will sink in water, an old one will float (over time, the air cushion in the egg increases, so the egg becomes lighter).

A speck of blood in the yolk does not indicate a spoiled egg. Just during the formation of the egg, the blood vessel broke through to the surface. The blood stain is easy enough to remove.

Store eggs with the pointed end down so that the air cushion is on top and doesn't collapse. Hard-boiled eggs in the shell can be stored in the refrigerator for a week without fear for their freshness.

By the way, eggs can be frozen for long-term storage. To do this, break the eggs into a bowl and close the lid tightly. Proteins and yolks can be frozen separately. The only difference is that the yolks must either be salted or sugar added (depending on which dish you will use them in after defrosting).

About the dangers and benefits of a bird product

Egg is a rich source of protein, riboflavin, vitamins A and D, choline and phosphorus. And if the yolk has a lot of fats and cholesterol, then the protein is a real storehouse of useful substances without fats and cholesterol. However, it is undesirable to eat more than two eggs a day.

It cannot be categorically stated that eggs are a heavy food. It's all about how it's prepared. The pattern is simple: the longer the egg is cooked, the slower it is digested by the body. However, raw eggs are poorly absorbed by the body. Plus, they contain avidin, which reduces the effect of some vitamins (group B). Moreover, there is a high probability of contracting salmonellosis and any other intestinal infection. The ideal solution to this issue is a soft-boiled egg.

Instead of a resume

For baking and frying, it is better to use fresh eggs: the pies will be lush, and the scrambled eggs will retain their beautiful shape. It is best to cook eggs that are not the first freshness - they will be better cleaned.