Tip For Peeling Eggs

Image by khunaspix via freedigitalphotos.net

 The best part of having your own chickens is fresh eggs.  Since spring feels like it has arrived in our neck of the woods, our chickens have ramped up their egg production significantly in the last couple of weeks.  This occurred right after I bought a dozen and a half eggs from Costco since I wasn't expecting to have so many fresh ones on hand for a few weeks yet.  Oops.  So here I was with a huge amount of eggs, trying to figure out what to do with them.  Then I remembered a family pot luck we had coming up and decided it would be the perfect opportunity to use up a dozen or more eggs in hard-boiled form on a big batch of potato salad.  Since I was making hard boiled eggs, I though I'd share my little trick for peeling them.

I never realized that people have a hard time peeling hard boiled eggs until I got married and my husband was complaining one day about how he couldn't get the eggs peeled very easily.  Then I noticed one day my mother-in-law struggling to peel a large batch of hard boiled eggs for a recipe.  How did they not know how to easily peel a hard boiled egg? Turns out the method I had been using since I was a small child is not well know.  In fact, my own mother didn't even know about it until I showed her a few months ago.  My grandma showed me how to do it one Easter when she had come to visit us, and I guess I just figured it was the way everyone did it.  The secret? A spoon.  A regular, silverware teaspoon (the smaller of the two table setting sizes).


Its easy! Once your eggs are cooked and cooled, gently hit the egg all over on a countertop or plate so that the shell is cracked into tiny pieces, then find a place where the egg shell and membrane are looser than everywhere else.  The less pointy end of the egg is usually where this happens.  Insert the spoon under the shell between the shell and the egg and use the spoon to loosen the shell and slide it/pull it off.  The spoon is just the right shape/size to slide under the shell of the egg!

It takes some practice to figure out the best place to get the spoon under the shell, but its easy once you get the hang of it. The shell comes off (mostly) in large sheets or peices still attached to the membrane rather than painstakingly picking of all of the tiny little specs of shell individually.  Home grown eggs' shells still come off a little tougher than store-bought (they're the slightly rougher looking ones below), but overall it does a pretty good job.  Hope this helps someone out there!!