Today I'm introducing what I hope will become another regular little feature on the blog. I originally wanted to name it "10 Minute Tips," but quickly realized that some of them (the first one included) take a bit longer than 10 minutes. So, instead, this will be known in general as Minute Tips, with the approximate time listed in parenthesis in the title. I don't have a huge list right now, but these tips will be an assortment of things I find helpful in my life, from cooking tips, to cleaning strategies, to simple organization. They likely won't be weekly, more just whenever one pops into my mind. Hopefully some of these can help you out in your busy lives!
First up, hard boiled eggs in the oven! I have seen this all over the Internet lately, but didn't have a chance to try it until this weekend. Ironically, even though I got the eggs "boiled," we never found time to dye them. That's on the to do list for tonight. Oddly enough, this isn't the first year we've dyed our eggs after Easter... oops!
Anyway, I had seen this trick for boiling eggs everywhere, so I finally decided to try it myself. For some reason, I have trouble remembering the steps and timing for hard boiling eggs, so this oven method seemed quite a bit more appealing than dragging out a big pot of water and looking up cooking times.
All you have to do is preheat your oven to 325 and either place your eggs directly on the oven rack (being careful to make sure your grate is more narrow than your eggs) or use a muffin tin. I opted for a mini muffin tin, which worked perfectly.
Just place your eggs in the tin, toss it in the oven, and bake for about 30 minutes. Just a warning since this scared the pants off of me- your eggs will likely have some brown spots when you pull them out of the oven- most of them came right off in the following step. A small one at the bottom did not, but it didn't affect the taste at all. I'm going to experiment with ways to prevent the spotting if I ever use this method for something like deviled eggs, but for regular eating, I could really care less!
Once you pull your eggs from the oven, CAREFULLY use tongs to transfer them to an ice bath. I squeezed one egg too hard and cracked the shell, thank goodness it was hard boiled!
See how all those spots are already gone? Leave the eggs in ice water for about 10 minutes (I guess this should be called a 40-minute tip...) then dry them off and store in the fridge. While this method definitely takes longer than the typical water boiled egg, it somehow seemed a lot easier to me. Maybe because I didn't have to monitor the eggs the whole time, or deal with fishing hot eggs out of boiling water. Plus, the eggs came out perfectly- completely hard boiled but without that greenish hue around the yolk that I can't seem to avoid with water boiling.
It'll probably take me a while to get through the dozen eggs I made this weekend, but I'm definitely going to be using this method whenever I need eggs hard boiled in the future. I can imagine it being especially helpful if you were making a large batch of deviled eggs or egg salad- I have two mini muffin tins that could each fit 24 eggs... I don't even want to think about how many pots on the stove top I would need to accomplish that!
Have any of you tried the hard boiled eggs in the oven method? What were your thoughts?Labels: Minute Tips
