How to Sous Vide Perfect Hard Boiled Eggs

November 17, 2016 by G. Stephen Jones 46 Comments

How to Make a Great Hard Boiled Egg That Peels Easily

If you like hard boiled eggs made the traditional way, you will love the results you'll get by preparing them sous vide.

Sous vide means "under vacuum" in French and is a cooking technique in which you vacuum-seal ingredients in plastic bags, submerge them in water, and cook them at “precisely controlled temperatures” for a specific time.

You can learn more about sous vide and read about my first experiences with this technique here.

Why Hard Boiled Eggs?

In my case, I'm making hard-boiled eggs because I'm on a diet, and they are the perfect source of high-quality proteins, amino acids, vitamins, and minerals and are only 77 calories. If you are counting calories like I am, a 77-calorie delicious hard-boiled egg with only 5 grams of fat and 6 grams of protein is an excellent snack between meals or can be added to a healthy salad for lunch or dinner.

If you're not on a diet, think deviled eggs, egg salad sandwiches, egg slices for a salad, stir-fries, or you can even try pickling some in vinegar, water and a little sugar. And who doesn't like just peeling one and dip it into a little salt & pepper? Yum!

Why Sous Vide Eggs?

The simple answer is that you can control precisely how firm the egg yolk and white will be EVERY time. There are many ways to make hard boiled eggs using the boiling technique, and each has factors that can change the outcome.

Depending on how you learned to prepare them, you may add eggs to a pot of boiling water for a specified amount of time or start with room temperature water, bring them to a boil and then let them sit for some time. How long it takes to bring them to a boil and how long you let them sit can drastically alter the finished product depending on lots of factors:

size of eggs - large, extra large, jumbo
age of the eggs
number of eggs
altitude
quality of pots you cook them in and the stove you cook them on

So the bottom line is by using this sous vide technique, you can prepare perfectly cooked hard boiled eggs exactly how you like them every time no matter how big they are, how many you cook or any of the other factors above.

Do They Taste Better?

That's so subjective and depends on the quality of the eggs you start with, but the eggs I cooked for this post were perfect and tasted amazingly good. That might be because of the time and effort I put in, or I'm always a little hungry and everything tastes better now that I'm on this diet.

I need to do a side-by-side taste tasting with both boiled and sous vide hard-boiled eggs and see if I can taste a difference. I can always get the perfect consistency with sous vide, and that's not always the case with boiling or steaming.

How To Make Hard Boiled Eggs That Peel Easily?

So here's the tricky part. To make sous vide eggs peel easily so they don't stick to the shell, pre-boil them for 3 minutes before adding them to the sous vide water bath. This may seem like a lot of extra work, but those 3 minutes will save you time and frustration when you start peeling those tasty orbs.

I know; I experimented with and without boiling the eggs first and learned firsthand this technique works. In the photos below, I pre-boiled the white egg for 3 minutes and then bathed it in ice water before adding it to the sous vide water. The results are evident when the brown egg went straight into the sous vide bath.

The brown eggs didn't peel nicely at all. They were extremely hard to peel, and I ended up with much of the egg stuck to the shell. Very disappointing!

If you are only going to make one or two hard-boiled eggs, using the boiling or steaming technique may be a lot easier, but if you plan on making a bunch of hard-boiled eggs, sous vide is the way to go.


Pre-Boiled Egg		No Pre-Boiling Egg

Why Are Older Eggs Easier to Peel When Hard Boiled?

Whether using the sous vide technique or the classic boiling method, older eggs are easier to peel after they are hard boiled. This is because as an egg gets older, the eggshell loses some of its protective coat, making it more porous and allowing it to take in more external air while releasing internal carbon dioxide.

As this process continues, the egg white shrinks, creating a small space between the egg white and the shell and thus making it easier to peel. On a more scientific note, as the egg white absorbs external air, it becomes more acidic.

A more acidic environment reduces the amount of stick the egg white (albumen) membrane has to the shell, making it easier to peel.

When you boil the eggs before placing them in the sous vide bath, you may be causing some of the same reactions created by age. If any scientists are reading this, please let me know in the comments section.

I also learned older eggs (and I am still determining exactly what age this happens) will float in water, whereas fresh eggs will sink to the bottom.

Time and Temperate for Hard Boiled Eggs

One thing I've learned about sous vide cooking is learning how long to cook something in a water bath and the water temperature for cooking.

It typically only matters with some ingredients you cook if you go over 5, 10, 15, or 30 minutes in most cases. You want to be careful not to use too low a temperature or cook for less time than required.

The first website I checked said 170°F for 1 hour, the next one I found said 165°F for 45 minutes, so I decided to go with 165°F for 1 hour and the results were spectacular. I cooked nine eggs, six white ones that were pre-boiled for 3 minutes, and three brown eggs that were not.

I don't think it would have mattered if I cooked an even dozen or two dozen. There was plenty of room in my sous vide container.

The recipe below starts with pre-boiling the eggs to facilitate the peeling. You don't have to take this step, but it's worth the time and effort.

Equipment

📖 Recipe

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