How To Make Hard-Boiled Eggs
By Bill Helmer, East Sierra Branch
When I asked my daughter how to hard-boil an egg, she looked at me with an expression I can only describe as patronizing, or maybe condescending, almost contemptuous. She asked me if I could boil water.
Of course I can boil water. I had already done that in an attempt to hard-boil eggs. Four eggs, actually, and if you think that was easy, think again. It caused a fire, which set off the kitchen’s smoke alarm, which forced me to flee the building and call the fire department on my cell phone.
Of course I’m exaggerating. It’s good to use some melodrama just to keep a reader interested. I don’t even have a cell phone.
Anyway, the fire was a little one. My electric stove has a front burner with those circular coils that become red hot and they lit some bits of pastry and other foodstuffs which had rendezvoused underneath. I don’t use the stove for actual cooking, but its placement next to the refrigerator makes it a handy place to set things. And the coils are always clean because the roaches don’t want to risk it. What I don’t understand is how come, when you use the microwave to warm something and then you take the food out, you sometimes see a baby cockroach running around inside. Shouldn’t it get cooked, too?
Where was I?
And while the fire did set off the smoke alarm, I’m not the sort who would risk the eggs by turning something off. So I was blowing out the fire that was licking around the pot, and the smoke alarm was singing, but I took care of that by fanning the alarm with a large manila envelope. No big deal
I should mention that I tried to hard-boil eggs in the past. One time I got the pot of water boiling, dropped in some eggs, and the suckers nearly exploded. Another time I added the eggs before turning on the stove. I brought everything up to a simmer for a good five minutes and the yolks came out runny. Since then, I’ve left any hard-boiling up to a wife or girlfriend who knows how to do it. (There was one girlfriend who wasn’t very clear about which knob turned on which burner, but she wasn’t very domesticated.)
Anyway, I did some research and if you want to hard-boil an egg, here’s how you do it.
First, you do not Google anything. It’ll get you to all sorts of websites that want you to do all sorts of goofyness. Instead, you call up your daughter or some other smart lady who’ll tell you to put enough ordinary tap water into a pot so as to cover the eggs, plus an inch or two. Then you turn on the proper burner. High. (Why not High?) After a few minutes the water starts to simmer. (You can tell because it begins to steam and little bubbles start coming up.) Very soon after that, the water breaks into a nice boil and then you turn it off. And I mean off-off.
Okay, the boil quickly goes back to a simmer and you let everything just sit there for about five minutes, until the water’s merely hot. Then (especially if your pot doesn’t have a nice glass lid) you figure out how to pour out the water.
Now what you’ve got are some really hot eggs. You can either leave them in the pot until everything cools off, or you can use a bunch of ordinary paper napkins (folded) to lift them out, one at a time, and put them on something or in something. (I use an ordinary cereal bowl.)
Once these babies are cool you can try about five different ways to get the white part out of their shells, which will be the subject of my next paper.