Cooking Tips

with 0 Comments Tags ,

How to Make Perfect Hard Boiled Eggs Every Time

Hard boiling an egg is a very simple process, but perfectly hard boiling an egg every single time is a little bit less simple. This guide will help you make perfect hard boiled eggs every time.

Hard-boiled eggs after peeling

How to Hard Boil an Egg

Bring your eggs out of the fridge before you get started. You will want them as close to room temperature as possible. While this isn’t terribly important, it does help ensure the eggs don’t crack when you boil them. A cracked shell during cooking will result in a rubbery egg.

This is how they should look in the pot.

Too much room is almost as bad, as it causes the boiling process to take too long and overcooks your eggs.

Start out with a large pot filled with water. You will need a large enough pot that your eggs can be rested at the surface of the water without being stacked one upon another. See the picture to the right for an example.

With your eggs already placed in the water, bring your pot to a boil. As soon as the water reaches a proper rapid boil, remove the pot from the heat source and cover it with a lid.

How Long to Cook Hard Boiled Eggs?

Once you have removed your eggs from the heat source you will leave them covered for between fifteen and twenty minutes, depending on the size of the egg. Longer for larger.

You should set a timer, because as soon as it hits the mark you choose based on the size of your egg, you must drain the hot water and cover the eggs in cool water. Leave the eggs sitting in cool water for a few more minutes.

The cool water serves two purposes: it prevents your eggs from overcooking, and it helps build up steam between the egg-white and the shell, which will make peeling the eggs easier.

Tips for Making Hard Boiled Eggs

  • Be careful about overcooking the eggs or leaving them unattended for too long. You can end up with a less than palatable film around the yolk.
  • When peeling the shells from your hard boiled eggs you should always start from the larger end. Because of the way the eggs would have cooked, there will be a small air bubble to assist with de-shelling your eggs.
  • Also consider de-shelling the eggs under cool running water. It helps get rid of any little excess pieces.
Fried Vegetables
with 0 Comments Tags , , , ,

How to Fry Vegetables in a Pan

There is a very simple “trick” to ensure that your pan-fried vegetables don’t end up all soggy. You can keep them crisp and delicious by following a few simple tips.

Fried Vegetables

Preheat Your Oil

When frying your vegetables in a pan the most important thing to do is make sure you give your oil enough time to pre-heat. Regardless of what kind of oil you are using, if you add the vegetables before it is hot enough to “spit,” then you’re going to end up with soggy vegetables.

If you’re not sure if you’ve given your oil long enough to preheat, give it longer. You’ll get a sense for how hot is hot enough over time. This is the most important thing you can do to end up with properly fried vegetables.

Cut Your Vegetables Evenly

Another thing you can do to ensure your fried vegetables come out perfect every time is to cut them at reasonably even sizes. Even if you’re frying multiple types of vegetables, if you keep them at fairly uniform sizes, you won’t end up with randomly under-cooked or over-cooked pieces.

Certain Vegetables Have Different Cooking Times

Onions and mushrooms take less time to fry than most other vegetables. Carrots or large pieces of broccoli or cauliflower take longer.

If you’re going to be frying multiple types of vegetables in one pan, add carrots or broccoli first, and add onions last. Almost always. Specific recipes may have reasons for exceptions to this specific rule, but the first two tips will always apply.

Bacon baskets
with 2 Comments Tags

How to Make Bacon Baskets

Because bacon is already cut into nifty little strips, you can turn it into things, as shown here in our recipe for the bacon weave. But not only is it pliable, bacon is delicious. These bacon bowls are fantastic for filling with scrambled eggs for breakfast or mashed potatoes for dinner. Try them out.

Read More…

Coddled eggs on homemade bread
with 0 Comments Tags ,

How to Coddle an Egg

Egg coddling is a method to use barely cooked eggs in some recipes, such as homemade caesar salad dressing. This is a quick and simple guide on coddling eggs.

Coddled eggs on homemade bread

A coddled egg is basically a lightly poached egg. This method is used to lightly cook an egg for recipes where you won’t be cooking the end product when containing eggs.

To coddle an egg, boil just enough water to cover the egg or eggs. Crack the egg into the water, and leave it for just about a minute.

Remove from heat, and remove the egg from the water with a slotted spoon. Or a regular spoon and some fancy moves.

And that’s it. That’s a coddled egg.

(Alternatively, you can use something like a coddled egg cup, but that requires buying something.)

A raw bacon weave, ready to be wrapped around something
with 0 Comments Tags

How to Make a Bacon Weave

A bacon weave is exactly what it sounds like. It’s bacon weaved together so that you can wrap things in a delicious sheet of bacon.

You can wrap just about anything in bacon to make it a minimum of thirteen times more delicious, but I would recommend wrapping it around a meatloaf or some baked chicken breasts for the full effect.

The full effect is when the bacon fat gets absorbed by whatever it’s wrapped around. Like magic.

A raw bacon weave, ready to be wrapped around something

It’s beautiful

Read More…