The Best Ways To Cook Hard-Boiled Eggs, Ranked By Peel-Ability

Because there's nothing worse than a poor-peeling egg.

Hard-boiled eggs are generally pretty easy to make -- just boil, peel and eat. But some eggs are easier to peel than others. Why is that?

One factor is the freshness of the eggs. The less fresh the egg, the easier they are to peel. This is because an egg's alkalinity increases as it ages, helping the egg white proteins bond together -- and not to the shell.

The method of cooking also has an effect. Knowing how to hard-boil eggs the right way can mean the difference between an easy-to-peel egg or one that's impossibly hard. So what's the best way? The folks at America's Test Kitchen put five common cooking methods to the test and graded them -- yes, like an egg report card -- according to how easy they were to peel.

America's Test Kitchen

What they found is that the best way to hard-boil eggs is by steaming them in boiling water or boiling them (but not with a cold water start). The worst way to hard boil eggs, in terms of peel-ability, is to bake them. These findings are huge -- especially if you're looking for a perfect peel to make deviled eggs, which obviously you should be.

If you want to find out more about this egg science, head on over to America's Test Kitchen for full details of their hard-boiling test and what the results mean.

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