Try it Tuesday! Hard Cooked Eggs in the Oven

I may have a Pinterest addiction.  Addiction or not, Pinterest is a great place to find all kinds of neat ideas: from cool craft projects to new, easier ways to accomplish tasks you've been doing forever.  If you’re on Pinterest, you've likely seen the photos of whole eggs in the shell in muffin pans going in the oven to be hard cooked (rather than boiled).  I've always been a curious sort, and I’m more likely than some to give crazy ideas a try.  Pinterest is like a drug dealer to my curiosity crack addiction!  Despite fears that trying it may result in exploded eggs all over my oven, I decided to give hard cooked eggs in the oven a go!

As I've mentioned before, I keep chickens.  In the past our chickens’ egg production slowed in the winter to a level that we barely had enough eggs for our family.  This year, however, my chickens are producing between 7 and 10 eggs a day!  I sell some of them locally, give away some to neighbors and family, and we've still got more than we can eat for breakfast.  Hard boiled cooked eggs would be a great solution!


So, I did some Google-ing and Pinterest searching and read a variety of instructions available on the internet.  I was looking for the “My oven is coated in exploded eggs” warning, but never found it.  I found an excellent explanation of the process at A Girl & Her Mutt.  She suggests that this is a great method for cooking a large batch of eggs and places her eggs directly on the oven racks with a cookie sheet below “just in case” an egg cracks.  I also found a recipe that claims to be Alton Brown’s Hard Cooked Egg Recipe; this, too, called for placing the eggs directly on the oven racks with cookie sheet back-up.  While I was up for an adventure and willing to deal with the consequences if the worst (egg Chernobyl) should happen, I decided to go with the muffin pan containment system I’d seen on Pinterest countless times.

Here’s what I did:

I gathered a dozen eggs and my muffin pan.  Isn't it a wonderful coincidence that a dozen eggs fit perfectly in my muffin pan?

The 30 minutes bake time includes the time it takes the oven to preheat to 325F.  So just pop in the muffin pan of eggs, turn on the oven, set a timer and go do something for 30 minutes!

My stove and oven control knobs live in a bowl on my countertop for now; since Little Man thinks that changing the settings when we aren’t looking is a brilliant plan!  I’m pretty sure that an adjustment in the oven temperature in either direction will lead to disaster.

After 30 minutes of baking, I was anxious to see if egg Chernobyl had occurred.  Although, as you can tell, my oven could do with a good cleaning (I have an “easy” oven cleaning method pinned for future reference)!  Thankfully, only one egg had a minute crack in it!

I had read that the eggs might make popping noises while they bake, but I didn’t stick around to hear if they did.  So, really, go do something and just listen for your timer!  You are safe from Egg Chernobyl!  Also, it’s normal for the eggs to have these spots when they are removed from the oven.  No worries, they come off in the ice water bath.

Remove the eggs from the oven and prepare a bowl full of ice water (I’m in Colorado and have a well, so ice wasn’t needed in mine); move the eggs to the water using tongs.

After about 5 minutes in the ice water, my eggs were cool enough to handle, so I began peeling them.  I had read that the eggs would have marks from being placed on the oven racks, most of mine had several marks where the egg had come in contact with the muffin pan.  While it isn’t pretty, you can’t taste it – I suppose if you were making deviled eggs with these you may want to carefully slice the brown area off the egg before use.  Also, placing the eggs on the oven rack would result in two evenly spaced marks instead of my unpredictable muffin pan marks!

Now, in my research I had been promised a cooked egg without the ugly green yolk that you sometimes get while boiling eggs and that the egg wouldn’t be rubbery.  As you can see, no grinch-colored yolks here!  And they tasted great!  Definitely worth repeating!

I realize that baking eggs for 30 minutes technically takes about twice as long as boiling eggs does; however, this method would be great if you needed several dozen eggs cooked.  Also, maybe it’s just me, but I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve gotten the eggs boiling and then forgotten about them!  In fact, I’m pretty sure the over-cooking is what leads to the green hard yolks and rubbery whites in boiled eggs.

Regardless, the main reason I wanted to give this a try was simply to satisfy my curiosity.  Consider it quenched!  No egg Chernobyl and a new way to cook my chicken’s excess eggs for use in egg salads, deviled eggs or simply as a quick and easy snack. YUM!

  

Today I'm joining a blog hops hosted at The Life of a Not So Ordinary Wife and Adventure into Domesticland.  If you've got a few minutes, you should hop over and link up, or just check out all the great blogs that have joined the hops!  It's a great way to discover wonderful blogs and support other bloggers!

Happy Tuesday!  Hope your day is a wonderful one!

Leave a comment below if you have a Pinterest Pin you want me to try!  Maybe you'll see it posted here next Tuesday!