Hillandale Farms offers guidance on boiling eggs perfectly

Boiled eggs are an excellent addition to breakfast. People can buy high-quality eggs through Hillandale Farms and boil them within minutes to start off their day on an energetic note. Boiled eggs are tasty, healthy, and hardly take much effort or time to cook, and hence are ideal for mornings when one is in a rush.

Hillandale Farms provides valuable advice on preparing the perfect boiled eggs

There are a number of tutorials available online for boiling eggs, and most of them are quite similar. Their steps include adding eggs to a pot of water, bringing it to a boil, turning off the heat, and then cooking the eggs till they are hard-boiled. But there is one glaring flaw in this approach, which is the type of pot being used.

Cast iron, stainless steel, and aluminum are known to have varied rates of bringing water to a boil and retaining heat. For instance, if eggs are sitting in a pot of cold water in a cast iron vessel, it will take about two minutes longer to reach a boil than in an aluminum pot. Therefore, one would have inadvertently cooked their eggs longer than required if they followed the same timing for a cast iron pot as they do with its aluminum counterpart. Eggs boiled for longer than necessary may get a green tinge around the yolk and have a rubbery white.

Soft-boiled eggs tend to require a precise cook time, and hence most tutorials involve cooking them in hot water. Hence, ultimately, there is no point in cooking hard-boiled eggs differently from soft-boiled eggs due to the reasoning underlined above.

No matter whether one wants to make hard or soft-boiled eggs, they firstly need to bring a pot of water to a boil with enough water to cover the eggs by an inch or so. As the water is boiled first, it does not matter which type of pot is being used as the eggs only hit the water after it is boiling, i.e., reaches 212°F (100°C). As the water starts boiling, its heat should be reduced to low, and a skimmer can be used to place the eggs gently into the water. Reducing the heat would prevent the eggs from bouncing around and cracking. As all the eggs get into the water, the heat can be turned back up to a boil. After doing so, one has to set a timer to cook the eggs as per how soft or hard they will like them:

How long to boil eggs:

• 6.5 minutes: A soft, jam-like yolk that is ideal for soft-boiled eggs on a salad or eggs on toast.
• 8 minutes:  A medium yolk that is bit soft but firm enough to hold on its own.
• 10 minutes: An almost hard-boiled egg with a slight softness in the middle.
• 12 minutes: A hard-boiled egg that has a lighter yolk.
• 14 minutes: A typical hard-boiled egg with a firm white, but not overcooked.

After boiling the eggs for an appropriate amount of time, they have to be placed in an ice-water bath to stop them from cooking and maintain the perfect texture. This approach can be followed after buying any chicken eggs from Hillandale Farms.