Why Eggs Could Be Getting Harder to Peel | Hacker News Reader

Why Eggs Could Be Getting Harder to Peel

wired.com

24 pointsShamiq15 comments

This is a great example of how we're losing track of information. Using older eggs is a trick well-known to my wife, who learned it from her mother. It seems more and more lately that we're re-discovering the wheel. Just a few weeks ago I was reading somewhere how a weaver had un-earthed a forgotten weaving technique through Google's book project.

In this case, the information was lost because it was no longer needed. The eggs in supermarkets already where 'old eggs' and so any egg you picked up was already ready to be used. Now that there is a trend toward 'farm-fresh' or even raising your own chickens in your backyard, the information is necessary again, but there are people that don't even realize that the information existed.

Indeed, they even cite McGee.

I'd love to see that weaving article if there's any chance you can find it.

I didn't figure this all out until we got our own chickens.

I even threw out an egg because it had been sitting outside for over a day. I didn't know at the time that a farmer has 30 days to sell his eggs. That the grocery store has another 30 days to sell the egg. And on top of that, you still have another 3 months before the egg actually goes bad.

Incredible! Even more incredible -- and this only applies to farm fresh eggs -- there is an anti-bacterial layer around the egg.

I am pretty impressed with eggs.

My parents have had eggs for decades and we always threw then away at the end of 3 weeks after they had been collected.

I might find myself doing the same soon, we're getting a little sick of eggs....

But I hope they didn't throw them out because they thought they went bad.

The Science of Making Perfect Boiled Eggs:

http://www.seriouseats.com/2009/10/the-food-lab-science-of-h...

This is an amazing article :)

I can never get my eggs that way (to be fair to myself, I don't cook too often).

Sunday morning is going to rock this weekend, though!

The article mentions Harold McGee's "On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen" which is an awesome book for learning the science behind cooking. I'd totally recommend that book in the tradition of food/cooking hacking.

Dumb! The trick is:

- if the eggs are cold, then place them in hot water for a few minutes.

- If the eggs are hot, place them in cold water for a few minutes.

Once that's done, all eggs peel easily.

This really only works with old eggs, where the temperature differential can help separate the albumen from the inner shell. To quote the master:

"...the best guarantee of an easy peeling is to use old eggs! Difficult peeling is characteristic of fresh eggs with a relatively low albumen pH, which somehow causes the albumen to adhere to the inner shell membrane more strongly than it adheres to itself. At the pH typical of several days of refrigeration, around 9.2, the shell peels easily. If you end up with a carton of very fresh eggs and need to cook them right away, you can add a half teaspoon of baking soda to a quart of water to make the cooking water alkaline (though this intensifies the sulfury flavor)." (On Food and Cooking (2nd Ed.), p. 88)

I remember some time ago I saw an infomercial advertising an egg peeler. Most things you see on infomercials are crap but this one seemed brilliant. It punctured a hole in the bottom of the egg and sent a bunch of slightly compressed air into it which exploded the eggshell outwards and completely peeled the egg. I would have totally gotten it if I cooked eggs (or anything else) at home. I wonder if that works on fresh eggs.

That "Eggstractor" website is straight out of 1997.

Unimpressed. By the title, I assumed they would make the case for some difference in the chicken's environment or the way the egg is processed before it's sold.

"'As the contents of the egg contracts and the air cell enlarges, the shell becomes easier to peel,' the USDA Shell Eggs from Farm to Table fact sheet states. 'For this reason, older eggs make better candidates for hard cooking,'"

...

"Statistics on the time it takes for an egg to go from hen to supermarket have not been calculated, a USDA representative told Wired.com, but there’s some reason to believe that new production techniques could be delivering eggs to markets faster."

So this article is just saying that eggs sold today are more fresh? Not even that - they "could be" more fresh? This hardly seems newsworthy.

I'm completely impressed even as it fits my mental model of possible causes. I've been an ardent egg boiler for years to make whites easy to eat. And only recently have I run into the pockmarked egg after boiling. It's horribly frustrating! But it makes sense. Only recently have I had really fresh eggs.

Now, knowing this, I'll just boil older eggs. It's a small victory, but a victory nonetheless!

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