الجمعة، 23 سبتمبر 2011

Why hard-boiled eggs are more difficult to peel

I've noticed this recently; I used to hard-boil eggs, then crack them and remove the shell in 5-6 pieces.  Now it typically involves  pick-pick-picking at little fragments and pockmarking the egg in the process.  Here's an explanation from an old Wired Science article:
The best guarantee of easy peeling is to use old eggs!” wrote Harold McGee, in his monster 800-page tome, On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen. “Difficult peeling is characteristic of fresh eggs with a relatively low albumen pH, which somehow causes the albumen to adhere to the inner shell membrane more strongly than it coheres to itself.”

McGee also suggests an easy cooking chemistry solution. “If you end up with a carton of very fresh eggs and need to cook them right away, you can add a half teaspoon of baking soda to a quart of water to make the cooking water alkaline (though this intensifies the sulfury flavor),” he wrote...

A 1998 report by the agency found that big consolidated chicken egg facilities, which wash and package the eggs on-site instead of sending them to a separate processing location, could reduce the time from farm to store from 100 hours to 53 hours. And, according to Cal-Maine’s SEC filings, the industry continues to centralize, squeezing out the old facilities in favor of the new ones.

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