Monday, April 21, 2008

Playing with Hard Cooked Eggs

While my soup was simmering, I prepared my hard cooked eggs for my Seders. My mother once boiled over 700 hundred eggs in one fell swoop, for all of the model Seders at my Hebrew School (in their commercial kitchen, thank goodness); she tells me that they lost quite a few of them to general tomfoolery as the students, who were recruited to peel them all, got a little silly. At home, mom occasionally allowed the water in the egg boiling pan to boil out, which resulted in a horrible smell throughout the house and ruined eggs and pan.

I follow Alton Brown's philosophy - why put eggs, which are so delicate, into the violence of boiling water? Therefore, I steam my eggs, for about 12 minutes, as Brown recommends in his book I'm Just Here for the Food.

I started with exquisitely fresh eggs from the Blue Egg Farmer. I placed these in the steamer and cooked for about 20 minutes (they took longer because they started out very cold from the fridge).



They were very difficult to peel, because they were so fresh - the membrane that normally pulls the shell off of the eggs wasn't fully formed yet! But we did get them shelled, and the results were well worth it:










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