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Comment by ajross | Hacker News Reader

> If you have a nice pot of boiling water at 100°, and you add a bunch of cold eggs

You're also likely to crack those eggs from the thermal stress. Standard American Frontier Cooking Tradition demands that cold eggs go in cold water and come to a temperature along with the water. Turn heat down to a simmer just as it reaches boiling. Five minutes for a standard soft boil, ten for hard boiled. Then place under running cold water to cool for 5 minutes before peeling (which you should do immediately, don't let the egg sit in its shell, it is much easier and cleaner to get it out now).

Works every time. Even on induction ranges, which I've been using for 11 years now. Frankly I don't know what the author of the linked article is complaining about.

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I'd also like to add that how easy an egg is to peel has nothing to do with how you cook it. Truly fresh eggs will not peel wonderfully. If you have some week old Kroger eggs, more than likely those things are several weeks old which changes the chemical composition of the egg. The shell/skin becomes more alkaline which somehow causes them to release from the white more easily.

If you have fresh eggs, boil them with some baking soda in the water.

For hard boiled just put cold eggs in cold water and boil them. When it boils, shut off the heat. When you can stick you hand in the water and pull them out they're done.

That kind of recipe is great, except different types of stoves and different amounts of water get to boiling in _vastly_ different amounts of time, and it affects the doneness of the eggs.

Recipes are better when they can actually be followed and get consistent results.

And that is why hackers tend to make poor cooks.

Look, you can reject Received Wisdom and do your own thing in the interests of rigor, or you can cook the way your grandmother did. We all know which produces better food.

Of course stoves are different. But trying to normalize things as an a priori goal (in this case by dropping cold eggs into boiling water!) only makes things worse. Traditional recipes are traditional precisely because they're tolerant of situational slop and occasional misinterpretation.

> Look, you can reject Received Wisdom and do your own thing in the interests of rigor, or you can cook the way your grandmother did. We all know which produces better food.

Hypothetical grandmother cooks well because she perfected the technique over a few decades.

That's great and all, but recipes are communication, and if they can't communicate _how_ to achieve grandmother results to a new person, then what in the hell is the point?

It'd be better off if the recipe just said "figure it out" then, instead of trying to imply certainty where none can exist due to stove differences.

> Of course stoves are different. But trying to normalize things as an a priori goal (in this case by dropping cold eggs into boiling water!) only makes things worse. Traditional recipes are traditional precisely because they're tolerant of situational slop and occasional misinterpretation.

Except this supposed recipe isn't tolerant of anything. Eggs are still over or under done based on a minute here or there, and which way is a guessing game without the context of which exact stove.

If that were the best possible, then fine, but there's other recipes that are actually repeatable in this comment page, so what's the benefit of the grandmother recipe again?

I’ve switched from starting everything cold to waiting until the water is boiling before adding the eggs, and the peelability is night and day. It’s far, far easier to peel them when the water is already boiling before adding the eggs.

I perforate the bottom of the egg with the needle of a small safety pin to prevent my eggs from cracking. Works like a charm.

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