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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

I doubt it's malarky.

If you're not an egg person, the difference is probably subtle.

There is an obvious difference in freshness between supermarket eggs and farm eggs. Egg freshness is uncontroversial; as they age, the membrane around the yolk breaks down and the whites thin. Supermarket eggs are usually around 2 weeks old.

There is an obvious difference in color between supermarket and farm eggs; farm eggs have orange yolks and supermarket eggs have yellow yolks. This does make it hard to blind an egg taste test, though. The color difference comes from the feed of the chicken.

Apart from cooking up better, farm eggs taste richer to me, and don't have "off" flavors (a small number of supermarket egg chickens get feed that includes fish meal).

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How do you peel such fresh eggs? I've found that with fresh eggs the shell sticks and is almost impossible to remove without shredding the egg.

By cooling them off, of course? You boil your eggs for ~6min to get a nice runny yolk, then you take it off the stove, put it under the cold tap for a little while until all the water in the pot is cold, let it sit for a minute, perhaps pour in more cold water if it's gotten lukewarm, and voila, perfect eggs that are easy to peel.

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What? How can you people not know this? Oh wow, I love these little cultural snippets where you assume that everyone else knows some things you do, because you were taught them as a child. :-D

You have obviously never actually done this with eggs that are less than a week from laying... The pH of a fresh egg is closer to neutral and this causes the inner membrane to really stick to the shell, even after cooking. After the eggs have been washed and refrigerated for several days the pH edges closer to 9 and the egg is easier to peel (and the cooling trick works.)

Oh. You're probably right. I have to test this!

Hm, eggs here in Sweden are generally washed, but not refrigerated, so it's neither like the situation in the UK nor the US. Interesting.

Hardboiling works best on old eggs, when the membrane between shell and white has started to degrade.

Think of hardboiling eggs as a recipe for getting the most out of old food, much like making french toast with stale bread or fried rice with yesterday's steamed rice.

So, what do you recommend for fresh eggs?

I personally would soft-boil or fry sunny side up. But I like my runny eggs. ;)

Put a teaspoon of baking soda in the water when you cook them. Also, the less pointy part of the egg will have a small bubble in the bottom (the fresher the egg, the smaller the bubble). Tap the rounded edge first, gently, and you should have a small space that you can get a finger into. ETA: try to grab the shell and the inner membrane together.

I heard the bit about baking soda in the water before, could you explain why it helps detaching the shell from the egg?

It's likely that because you're cooking them in a basic (ph, acid vs base, etc) solution that the egg is being changed chemically. Using a harsher base might shed more light on that (though would possibly make it inedible).

> though would possibly make it inedible

Nope: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thousand_year_egg#Modern that's with alkaline, and you can use acid to make a pickled egg.

Looking at it, i'd consider it inedible :) But good to know that stronger bases have been used to do that kind of thing.

Baking soda is alkaline and breaks down proteins especially together with heat.

I don't know any method to peel fresh eggs without shredding them. If you can avoid it, don't peel. Cut the egg in two and empty it with a spoon.

You can try rolling the egg on a hard flat surface applying pressure. The shell cracks into small shards and I find it easier to peel without damaging the egg.

You can also tell a really fresh egg from a supermarket egg by visual inspection of them once they have been cracked on to a flat surface.

//deleted// feeble attempt at ascii art.

An unfresh egg has a flat white, with a dome for the yolk.

A really fresh egg has an extra raised bit just before the yolk. In cross section it has three levels, rather than two.

I get what you mean. Funnily enough, my reaction to an egg that doesn't have the dome in the white as well is that it's old and should be discarded. I'd probably fry it, but double-check it, and throw away the box if there were any eggs left in it. I don't think you can buy eggs that aren't really fresh in any supermarket here.

And from reading the article, I get the impression that weeks-old refrigerated eggs are the norm in the US. I had no idea. Yuck. :-)

(I know I'm wrong, refrigerated eggs last a long time, and they're perfectly fine, it's just not what I'm used to or were brought up to.)

Even unrefrigerated, fresh eggs last an amazingly long time. They aren't as pretty but are fine to eat.

Older eggs are fine for baking though.

And they're even better for hard-boiling, as the shell is more easily removed.

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