Tonight we are going to dye our Easter eggs, which means that we need more hard-boiled eggs in our house. I already posted on an easy, no-frills way to make perfect hard-boiled eggs earlier this week, but saw an idea on Pinterest from The Burlap Bag that looked easy too – baking them. Since I needed to make a lot of eggs, I thought this would be the perfect time to test the two out together and see which one I liked better.
For the oven method: Preheat your oven to 350 degrees. Put the eggs into the compartments of a muffin tin. Bake for 30 minutes.
As I was filling the remaining compartments up with water, I decided to fill one of the compartments with an egg in it with water as well to see if it changed the outcome.
Meanwhile: I boiled the water for my method. After it came to boiling, I put the eggs in. Since I knew for sure that my way would work, I did more of the eggs that way.
Worked again – not a single broken egg.
I started boiling the water when I put the other eggs in the oven. I finished with the stove-top eggs nine minutes before the oven ones were done. So, my way was faster, but the oven way is definitely easier: preheat, cook, forget about them until the timer is done.
Round 1 (cooking): My way – 4 points (faster, but more steps); Oven way – 5 points (slower, but one-step)
After cooking the eggs, I let them sit in a cold water bath. I’d check on the water every bit to make sure the water hadn’t warmed up. If it had, I just dumped out the warm water and filled it up again with cold water. When moving the eggs from the muffin tin to the water, tongs is the easiest way to go.
After they sat in the water, it was time to judge the appearance of the eggs. On the outside, they all looked the same. No spotting, just like normal eggs.
Then I peeled each of them to see how easy they were to peel, and judge how well they had cooked.
Yikes! The oven eggs were a little tougher to peel (some of the egg came off with the shell), and had some internal brown spotting. The oven way with the water inside actually browned more (but less concentrated), and some of the egg still came off with the shell. The other egg peeled fine, and looked normal.
Appearance: My way – 5 points (all looked normal); Oven way – 3 points (outside looked normal, inside had a couple of brown spots and some bits of egg peeled off as well as the shell)
Now came time to judge the internal appearance, texture and taste of the eggs. Here’s how they sliced up:
All three of the eggs had a similar, very nice texture. They were easy to slice through, and all well-cooked. The oven eggs both had a little grayish ring around the outside of their yolks, but it wasn’t bad. The stove egg had no ring.
Internal Appearance/Texture: My way – 5 points (perfect); Oven way – 4.5 points (slight docking for grayish ring)
As far as the taste was concerned, they all tasted pretty good. The oven-baked eggs seemed to have a more “eggy” taste to them (even in the whites), where the stove-top egg did not have that taste. If it hadn’t been for the contrast of the stove egg, I probably would not have thought much of it.
Taste Rating: My way – 5 points; Oven way – 4.5 points (slight docking for taste)
Overall Score: My way – 19 points; Oven way – 17 points
Depending on what you’re going for, either of these would be fine. If you need an egg to dye and don’t mind the brown spotting on the inside of the egg, the oven way is a bit easier and the finished egg still has a great texture, is fairly easy to peel, and tastes good. My way is an all-around good way to do the egg, takes slightly more work in the prep (carefully dropping the eggs in the water), but still gets done faster, and has a great texture, taste and appearance.
Happy Egging!
