Right before Easter, I saw a post on
Huffington Post about how to perfectly peel a hard boiled egg. The video showed the egg being shaken in a glass of water.
Anytime I see a kitchen hack, I'm skeptical. So many of them simply don't work. Is your spaghetti water foaming too much and boiling over? Don't put a wooden spoon on top of the pot. It doesn't work. Do your hands smell of onion after slicing one? Don't touch them to a stainless sink. They'll still be smelly. You get the idea.
I did try this shortcut though because with Easter coming, I knew I'd need to peel eggs for deviling. I wanted my job to be as easy as possible. To start, I hard boiled the oldest eggs in my refrigerator. Fresh eggs are harder to peel.
After the eggs were hard boiled and cooled enough to handle, I put one in a lidded container with about an inch of water. Sure enough, I shook it vigorously and the shell popped right off in the water.
Peeling hard boiled eggs has never been easier! Here's my egg popping right out of its shell.
I repeated the process with three eggs in the container. The shells cracked and came off in one piece when I peeled at them. They were not floating loosely in the water. Of all the eggs I peeled using this method, I only found any shell on one egg. A shard of shell had stuck into the egg white. If I had not inspected each egg, I would not have noticed but it would've been an unpleasant surprise to whoever ate the deviled egg later.
Bottom line: this technique works! Don't crowd the eggs in a container. They need to be able to shift freely. Inspect the eggs after to make sure no shards stick into the eggs. Biting into egg shell is the worst.
