Start Hot, Finish Cold: How to Make The Best Hard-Cooked Eggs

“They couldn’t boil an egg” is an insult often leveled at the culinarily challenged, but boiling an egg that will peel is a task that can frustrate even seasoned home cooks. Whether you’re hard-cookingthem for Oeufs Mayonnaise (or their American counterpart, deviled eggs), soft-cooking them for Soy Sauce Eggs, or just making a batch of egg salad, marred egg whites can put a damper on your dish.

There’s a lot of advice out there on this particular topic, much of which is bad, along with many supposed egg-peeling “hacks.” Should you start them in cold water and bring them up to a boil? Plunge them into water that is already boiling? Just how necessary is an ice bath? And what about steaming?

The answer is two-fold, though simple: Start them hot and finish them cold.

Why you should always use a hot start when hard-cooking eggs

There are tons of gimmicks for cooking eggs in their shell. Poke a hole in the shell. Use an old egg. Add baking soda to the water. None of these work as well as simply starting with hot water.

The first cookbook I ever owned set me up for failure in this regard, instructing me to place fridge-cold eggs in a pan of cold water, then bring the water to a boil. It was a disaster. The shell stuck to the egg as if glued in place, taking big chunks of the white with it during peeling. It put me off making deviled eggs for years.

One day, I tried the opposite approach, bringing the water to a boil before adding the eggs. The shells practically slid off when I went to peel them.

Why?

Eggs started in cold water gradually cook as the water’s temperature increases, causing the egg white to bond with the membrane on the inside of the shell. Bring the water to a boil first, and the sudden change in temperature causes the white to release from the membrane, allowing for easy peeling.

Something very similar happens if you try to fry an egg (or sear a steak) in a stainless steel pan that hasn’t been heated evenly and completely — the proteins bond with the pan. Get that same pan nice and hot, however, and the proteins seize when they hit the scorching metal, bundling up into themselves.

But a hot start is only half of the equation.

Finish hard-cooked eggs with a cold plunge

J. Kenji López-Alt seemingly had the last word on hard-cooked eggs in his 2019 New York Times article, where he claimed steaming was the key to perfectly peel-able eggs with tender whites. Chris Kimball himself was on board with the method untila trip to Paris taught him otherwise.

“J. Kenji López-Alt had convinced me that steaming was the secret to easy-peel hard-cooked eggs. My visit with chef Christopher Edwards, however, shifted my attention to chilling,” he wrote. “He demonstrated how a large ice bath was key, cooling hot eggs quickly to shrink the whites so they more easily separate from the shells. However, López-Alt and I agree that starting with refrigerator-cold eggs in a hot environment is critical—starting the eggs with cold water always produced hard-to-peel eggs. For us, boiling edged out steaming, but take your pick.”

How large of an ice bath should you use? “For cooling, our tests showed that one tray of ice cubes plus 2 cups of water is the minimum required for 4 eggs, so 12 eggs require three trays and 6 cups.” wrote Chris. “Chill for 3 minutes, making sure to fully submerge the eggs.” Short on time? “Running the eggs under cold water for 3 minutes also worked,” he added, “but not nearly as well as the ice bath.”

I have personally never noticed the whites of boiled eggs to be any less tender than those of steamed, and prefer the streamlined, no-steamer-basket-necessary approach we take with our Hard-Cooked Eggs, which also works for soft-cooked—just shave a few minutes off the cooking time. Boiling for 6 to 6½ minutes gave us perfectly just-runny yolks; 8½ to 9 minutes for medium yolks; and 12½ to 13 minutes for hard-cooked yolks.

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Claire Lower

Claire Lower is the Digital Editor for Christopher Kimball’s Milk Street, with over a decade of experience as a food writer and recipe developer. Claire began writing about food (and drinks) during the blogging boom in the late 2000s, eventually leaving her job as a lab technician to pursue writing full-time. After freelancing for publications such as Serious Eats, Yahoo Food, xoJane and Cherry Bombe Magazine, she eventually landed at Lifehacker, where she served as the Senior Food Editor for nearly eight years. Claire lives in Portland, Oregon with a very friendly dog and very mean cat. When not in the kitchen (or at her laptop), you can find her deadlifting at the gym, fly fishing or trying to master figure drawing at her local art studio.