With Easter approaching, eggs tend to be on sale about now, so it’s a good time to stock up.  And maybe a good time to learn a few tips and tricks to make cooking with eggs a little easier for you.

Anatomy of an Egg

To start with, let’s learn a few key parts of an egg.  I’m not the world’s greatest artist, and was working with limited design tools, so please bear with my rough diagram.

There are six major parts in the diagram above.

1. The yellow part is, obviously, the yolk.  Much of the protein is concentrated here, as is the cholesterol (which, contrary to popular belief, is good for you, and lecithin (which actually helps your body use the cholesterol effectively). Most of the flavor comes from the yolk, too!
2. Immediately surrounding that is the albumin, or the “white.” A lot of protein is here, as well.  If you’re allergic to eggs, this is probably the part you’re allergic to.
3. Those grey things in the diagram — those aren’t actually grey in real life; they’re whitish.  They’re called chalazae, and are generally a non-issue in cooking.  They may occasionally make it a little tricky to separate the yolks from the whites, though.  (Or your kids might just think they’re gross.)  In the developing egg, their purpose is to keep the yolk suspended in its place.
4. The thin black line surrounding the yolk, albumin, and chalazae represents the membrane.  If you’ve ever tried to peel a really tough-to-peel hard-boiled egg, you have probably encountered this skin-like portion.
5. The thick black line represents the shell.
6. At the base of the egg, between the membrane and the shell is an air pocket.  This little air pocket is pretty important to some of the other things we’ll talk about in a moment.

Choosing Healthy Eggs

As with everything else in the food world, brown eggs are healthy and white eggs are less healthy, right?  Actually, that’s a myth.  The shell color of an egg has nothing to do with its nutritional value.  Just as our skin color demonstrates only our ethnicity and not our internal value, the color of an egg’s shell only reflects the breed of chicken.  Some lay brown-shelled eggs, some lay white-shelled eggs, and some even lay blue- or green-shelled eggs.  (Interesting tidbit, though: as far as I’m aware, no chicken breeds native to the United States lay white eggs.)

The shell color of an egg has nothing to do with its nutritional value. Share on X

What should you look for, then?  Well, as is typically true for animal-based foods, those eggs which come from chickens living most naturally are also the best nutritionally.  In the “real world,” chickens roam freely, and they are not vegetarians!  (They eat bugs, along with vegetation.)  Naturally-raised chicken eggs contain higher levels of Omega-3 fatty acids and, I believe, higher levels of vitamins A and D.

The term “free range” on an egg carton doesn’t really mean anything of value.  This simply means the chickens were allowed outside for a little while.  It doesn’t mean they were raised primarily outside, that they were allowed to forage, etc.  “Organic” is almost as useless.  “Organic” eggs may be free of pesticide and hormone residues (both good things!), but they still probably don’t have the more desirable nutritional profiles, if that is the only thing to set them apart.

Ideally, you want pasture-raised eggs.  If you can get them from a local farmer you know and trust, so much the better.

You can often actually see the difference in the eggs, by looking at the yolks.  A supermarket egg usually has a relatively pale yolk, and it’s often rather flaccid.  A good farm-raised egg typically has a dark yellow, almost orange yolk (probably reflecting the higher vitamin A content), and the yolk is typically firmer.  (I’ve discovered that in the dead of winter, there may not be as obvious a difference.  I think this has to do with what food the chickens have access to during the warmer months that isn’t available during the winter.)

Identifying “Good” Eggs

You’ve had some eggs sitting around in your fridge for a while, and you’re wondering whether they’re good or not.  That air pocket we learned about a few paragraphs up is going to come in handy for letting us know.  As the egg ages, that air pocket expands, so you can tell how old an egg is by whether or not it floats.

You can tell how old an egg is by whether or not it floats. Share on X

Put your egg(s) (gently!) in a large bowl of water.  A very fresh egg will sink to the bottom of the bowl.  An egg that is getting a bit older — but is still good — will stand on end, but still rest at the bottom.  If it floats, it’s old and you probably want to throw it out!

Hard-Boiling…or Not?

But now you want to hard-boil your eggs.  Except you don’t.  Eggs should actually not be boiled; they get tough.  The best way to hard-cook eggs is to put them in a pot of cool water to cover them, bring the water to a boil, then cover the pot and remove it from the heat.  Let it sit, covered, for 20 minutes, then immediately place the eggs in cool water to keep them from cooking any further.  (If they overcook, the yolks will sulfurize and get grey and icky-looking, although they’re still fine to eat.)

If you’re feeling a bit more adventurous, you could try hard-cooking your eggs in the oven (I think I’ve seen some people use muffin tins to keep them from rolling around), or in the pressure cooker or slow cooker/crockpot.

Peeling the Hard-Cooked Eggs

They’re such a pain to peel, though, right?  Maybe.  But they don’t have to be.  The first trick to peeling hard-cooked eggs is to use old eggs.  Remember our little air-pocket experiment?  You don’t want bad eggs, obviously, but the older eggs have more air between the shell and the main part of the egg, keeping the shell from adhering so firmly to the egg.  So if you use the ones that are at the standing-on-end stage, they’re just right!

The second trick is to make sure the egg is completely cool before you try to peel it.

The third trick is to crack the egg all over, and then roll it around (you can do this on a table or counter, but I like to roll it between my hands) — this tends to loosen the membrane from the egg white.  (If your eggs are very fresh, though, this still might not work, because the membrane will be so stuck the egg itself will just crack.)

I haven’t found any tricks with baking soda, salt, etc. to really make a significant difference one way or the other.

 

What’s your favorite way to eat/use eggs?