Skip to main content
Main

Boiled Egg

A boiled egg is cooked in water until the yolk and white set.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
Jump to recipe ↓

Boiled Egg

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Bring a saucepan of water to a boil.

  2. Gently place the eggs in the boiling water using a spoon to avoid cracking the shells.

  3. For soft-boiled eggs, cook for 3 to 4 minutes.

  4. For hard-boiled eggs, cook for about 10 minutes.

  5. After boiling, crack the shells and let the eggs sit in cold water to prevent a dark ring around the yolk.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Set by heat, so cooking time decides whether the white and yolk are soft or firm.

The step that matters

Timing the cook. Egg proteins set progressively with heat, so the difference between soft and hard yolks depends on minutes in the water. Cooling quickly stops further cooking and helps prevent a dark ring forming around the yolk.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

More boiled egg recipes

You might also like