Boiling eggs could be so easy. But it’s not – sometimes it’s too soft, sometimes too hard, sometimes it bursts when cooking. Find out here how long it takes to cook the perfect egg.
It doesn’t matter whether you prefer a hard-boiled or a soft-boiled egg for breakfast – it is important to buy organic eggs to save the chickens unnecessary suffering. When you boil your egg, there are only two things you need to keep in mind to get the result you want: the size of the egg and the cooking time.
Soft or hard-boiled eggs: rule of thumb for cooking eggs
Before you get started, you should check the size of your egg. The cooking time varies depending on the size. There are the egg sizes S, M, L, and XL – they are noted on the egg carton.
Basically, you cook the eggs like this: just put them in boiling water and rinse them with cold water after the cooking time. For M eggs one can roughly say:
Four minutes: The egg white is set, but the yolk is still very runny – a perfect breakfast egg.
Seven minutes: the yolk is soft as wax – now you have a snack egg.
Eleven minutes: The yolk is hard and cutable – a typical hard-boiled egg.
If you are using S eggs you will need to cook them about 30 seconds less, for L eggs 30 seconds more.
Cooking eggs: It depends on the temperature
It would be nice if you could simply specify a number of minutes after which an egg is hard- or soft-boiled. But it’s not really about the cooking time, but about the temperature that the inside of the egg has to reach for the respective texture. And the “internal temperature” depends on three factors:
The size of the eggs – an XL egg takes longer to hatch than an S egg.
The temperature of the eggs – did you just get them out of the fridge or have they been out for a while? They take up to a minute longer from the fridge.
The temperature of the cooking water – most of us cook the eggs in bubbling boiling water. It’s about 100 degrees warm by the sea, but only 90 degrees on the Zugspitze. The higher your location, the longer the egg has to cook.
In fact, the egg white becomes solid at 62 degrees. The yolk is already no longer liquid at 63 degrees – so a solid egg white with a liquid yolk is not so easy to find! At around 66 degrees Celsius, the egg yolk is soft as wax, and at 70 degrees it is hard and cut-resistant.
For example, if you want a perfect egg, you could cook the egg at 66 degrees for hours and still end up with a waxy egg. However, most kitchen appliances are not that accurate in practice.
Cooking eggs
Are you unsure if your egg is still good? Then don’t just throw it away, but find out with the egg test. Because many eggs have a longer shelf life than the best-before date promises.
Eating fewer eggs overall is even better. You can also use vegan egg substitutes for many recipes – just give it a try!
