According to our friends at Delish, adding a teaspoon of baking soda to your boiling pot of water will help the shell peel off seamlessly. Why? The alkaline in the baking soda will help your egg whites loosen up from the shell, making it easier to peel.
Apparently, baking soda raises the eggs' pH level and makes them easier to peel. You simply add 1/2 teaspoon of baking soda to a quart of water and then follow the usual steps of hard boiling an egg.
Use Baking Soda for Hard Boiled Eggs
For those of you who use fresh farm eggs, I also recommend adding about 1/4 – 1/2 teaspoon of baking soda to the water as you cook your eggs in addition to aging them. This will cause your eggs to have more of a smell when cooked but will make them easier to peel.
Because older eggs have more alkaline, you shouldn't add vinegar to the cooking water, though some recipes recommend it. Adding about a teaspoon of baking soda to the cooking water increases the alkalinity, which will make the eggs easier to peel later on.
A boiling start for 30 seconds to a very gentle simmer for 13 minutes, then an ice bath at the end makes perfect, easy-to-peel hard-boiled eggs.
Adding white vinegar or apple cider vinegar to your pot of water allegedly results in softer, easier-to-peel eggshells. That's because the acid in vinegar dissolves some of the calcium carbonate that makes up the egg's hard exterior.
We brought 3 pots of water, each with 2 quarts of water, to a boil. We added 1 teaspoon of baking soda to one pot, 1 tablespoon of white vinegar to the next, and left the third as straight H2O. We added 5 eggs to each pot of boiling water, boiled for 12 minutes, then immediately transferred the eggs to an ice bath.
Mixing a small amount of baking powder (just one-eighth of a teaspoon per two large eggs) into beaten eggs before cooking will work the same magic that it does on pancakes, and will result in eggs that are light and fluffy.
Why are fresh eggs so hard to peel? The fresher the eggs, the harder they are to peel. This is because the egg white or “albumen” in a fresh egg has a relatively low pH level, making it acidic. When cooked, these fresh egg whites bond strongly to the inner shell's membrane.
Here's a hard-boiled egg tip that we know to be true: Starting your eggs in hot, already-boiling water makes them easier to peel. In a column for Serious Eats, cookbook author and food columnist J. Kenji López-Alt found that "starting cold resulted in eggs that had just over a 50% success rate for clean peeling.
Carefully place the eggs in a large saucepan; add cold water to cover by one inch, and bring to a rolling boil. Cover pan; remove from heat. Let stand 12 minutes, then drain and rinse under cool water. To store, keep eggs unpeeled in the refrigerator, up to 4 days.
How To Boil Eggs Perfectly: Place eggs in a single layer at the bottom of a large saucepan or pot. Add enough water to cover the eggs with at least 1 in (2.5 cm) of water over them. Add a tablespoon (15 mL) of vinegar and a tablespoon (14 g) of sea salt to the pot.
As J. Kenji López-Alt explains in his book The Food Lab, salt inhibits the proteins in the egg yolks from binding too tightly as they heat up, which results in a moister, more tender curd: “When eggs cook and coagulate,” he writes, "the proteins in the yolks pull tighter and tighter together as they get hotter.
Add salt to the water? Egg white solidifies more quickly in hot, salty water than it does in fresh. So a little salt in your water can minimize the mess if your egg springs a leak while cooking.
You should use a ratio of 1:2 baking soda to vinegar. In other words, if you're using ½ cup of baking soda, use 1 cup of vinegar, or if you're using a cup of baking soda, use 2 cups of vinegar.
Always keep the ratio one-part baking soda to two parts vinegar for the best drain cleaner for kitchen sink gunk.
Although mixing vinegar and baking soda is not considered dangerous, you should still avoid mixing these in a container. Vinegar is acidic and basic soda is basic, so the by-products are sodium acetate, carbon dioxide, and water that are not toxic.
Add salt to the water to help keep the eggshells from cracking too soon. Add vinegar to water in the pot to make eggshells easier to peel. Add eggs to the cold water.
It's not necessary to add anything to the water. Some people also swear that adding a bit of salt, vinegar or even baking soda to the boiling water makes eggs easier to peel and/or makes them taste better. We, however, prefer the simplicity of plain ol' water.
It doesn't matter if they are peeled or unpeeled, but it would be helpful to put the eggs in a bag and label it in order of the day you boiled them to make sure you know when they will spoil. Always make sure to dispose of hard-boiled eggs once they have been left out for too long.
The quick cooling of the hard-boiled eggs causes the egg whites to contract, freeing them from the membrane. If you let them cool for about 15 minutes, the peeling is much easier.