Just don’t cook!
The egg trick that hardly anyone knows
© Maxim Khytra / Shutterstock
We learned that we have to boil eggs to cook them. But there is one method of preparation that is much better because it only has advantages.
The breakfast egg is a beloved Sunday morning ritual for many. During the week you usually don’t have the time or leisure to boil eggs. All the more, the perfect breakfast egg characterizes the start of a cozy Sunday.
Everyone likes their egg individually and usually knows pretty well how many minutes it has to be boiled so that it is soft, medium-hard or almost liquid, depending on your preference.
But what hardly anyone knows exactly: What can I do to prevent the eggs from bursting while cooking and the water from bubbling over? Taking the egg out of the refrigerator early and piercing the thick end with a needle before boiling it may help.
In an attempt by the WDR with 3000 eggs, however, it was found that around every tenth egg bursts – regardless of whether it was pierced or not.
The trick: steaming instead of boiling
Fortunately, there is a much safer trick: don’t boil the egg, steam it. That means you don’t boil your egg, but cook it in steam. It cannot burst, your stove is not submerged and it also saves energy and time because less water has to be heated.
To steam the eggs, you actually only need a pot and a sieve that you can hang in the pot. If available, the steamer insert for your pot or a steamer is of course also suitable.
By the way, steaming is the principle of the electric egg cooker, which some of us still know from our youth, but which has gone out of fashion because at some point the fate of most kitchen gadgets overtakes it: it stands in the way and collects dust.
Cooking eggs in steam: this is how it works
Because the eggs do not boil in the water, they are only steamed, two to three centimeters of water are enough to bring them to a boil. You now lay the eggs in the sieve that you have hung close to the surface of the water. In this way, the eggs are cooked by the rising steam without bursting. The peel is easier to peel off after steaming than after cooking.
After 6 minutes (for soft eggs) to 11 minutes (hard eggs) the breakfast eggs are ready and waiting to be eaten with relish.