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11 Facts You Should Know About Hard-Boiled Eggs

There's arguably no food more versatile than the egg. It can be cooked in so many ways that the 100 folds in a chef's hat are said to symbolize the 100 ways you can cook an egg, though there are at least 101 ways by our count. Perhaps the most versatile preparation is the hard-boiled egg. Unlike soft-boiled eggs, which are only partially cooked resulting in a runny yolk, hard-boiled eggs are cooked all the way through. Delicious on their own, hard-boiled eggs are also the star of (or at minimum the best supporting actor for) dishes like deviled eggs, Cobb salad, and egg salad sandwiches.

While you may already know the difference between a hard-boiled egg and a soft-boiled egg, as well as how to cook the perfect hard-boiled egg with a creamy yet fully set yolk, there's plenty you likely don't know about this superfood. From their humble beginnings and nutritional profile to all the tricks for peeling them, here are 11 facts you should know about hard-boiled eggs.

Read more: 14 Liquids To Add To Scrambled Eggs (And What They Do)

Americans Love Hard-Boiled Eggs

hands slicing boiled egg - Katleho Seisa/Getty Images

In 2022, the food blog Pantry & Larder compiled Google Trends results from all over the United States to determine the most popular egg-cooking preparation in America and, perhaps surprisingly, the boiled egg came out on top. To get the data, P&L looked at the most-searched egg styles from state to state and compared that with the national average. In 17 states, the most searched egg style was the boiled egg (the next closest was the poached egg, with 10 states searching it more than any other style).

To break things down even further, the blog looked at the trends differentiating between hard-boiled and soft-boiled eggs in all 50 states and found that the hard-boiled egg was the clear favorite with 30 states preferring it (based on search frequency). There are certainly some limitations to this analysis since we can't get into the minds of Americans during their Google searches (and it's possible that everyone already knows how to make the best scrambled eggs or fried eggs). Still, that many searches for hard-boiled eggs certainly means a lot of Americans are making and consuming them for more than just Easter and Thanksgiving.

Hard-Boiled Eggs Are A Quick Source Of Protein

boiled egg on avocado toast - Synergee/Getty Images

Protein is an essential nutrient not only for your muscles (just ask any bodybuilder), but also for building healthy bones, cartilage, and even skin. While many of us may eat some form of meat as our biggest source of protein, hard-boiled eggs are also a great source of the important nutrient and are much more portable than some other sources like meat and fish. One large egg contains 6.3 grams of protein and is considered a complete protein because it contains all nine of the essential amino acids humans are unable to make in their own bodies (we can make the other 11). While there are other portable sources of protein like nuts, seeds, and even vegetables and whole grains, those sources of protein don't contain all nine of the essential amino acids and are therefore considered incomplete proteins.

For a quick source of protein before or after a workout, or for a protein-rich breakfast on your way out the door for your morning commute, a simple boiled is a great option. For more substance and the perfect Millennial nosh, add a sliced hard-boiled egg to the top of your avocado toast.

They're Also Good For Your Heart – Really!

bowl of sliced boiled eggs - Africa Studio/Shutterstock

When you think of hard-boiled eggs with their bright yellow or orange yolks, there's a chance you also instinctively think about cholesterol as well. It's true that eggs contain cholesterol (around 186 mg in a typical large egg) and that cholesterol -- particularly "bad" LDL cholesterol -- can clog your arteries and lead to heart disease or even a stroke, but it turns out that the cholesterol in eggs doesn't raise our cholesterol the way scientists and doctors once feared. Researchers in a 2018 study found that adults who ate eggs every day were actually less likely to have heart disease or a stroke than people who didn't. Because their findings were so significant, the researchers wanted to understand what was going on so they completed another study to figure it out.

In the follow-up study, published in 2022, they found that people who regularly ate eggs had more beneficial proteins in their blood, including some that helped increase HDL -- or "good" -- cholesterol, as well as fewer of the markers that are associated with heart disease. Speaking about their results, study author Canqing Yu told eLife, "Together, our results provide a potential explanation for how eating a moderate amount of eggs can help protect against heart disease."

Boiled Eggs May Even Have Less Cholesterol Than Other Eggs

Different preparations of eggs - SherSor/Shutterstock

You would think that the nutritional profile of an ingredient like eggs would be the same no matter what way they're cooked, but you'd be wrong. Sure, it's obvious that if you're cooking an egg in oil or butter the fat will change the egg's nutrition, but it turns out that's not the only thing contributing to the differences. Even if you fry an egg in a nonstick pan without any added fat, it will be nutritionally different than a boiled egg.

While we now know that not all cholesterol in eggs is bad, and can actually be protective, the temperature at which eggs are cooked can further impact how the cholesterol in them is oxidized and absorbed in the body. According to a 2003 study in the journal Biological Research, the high-temperature cooking of eggs in preparations like frying leads to more cholesterol oxidization (which leads to more LDL or "bad" cholesterol) than relatively lower-temperature cooking like boiling. So while eating eggs regularly is good for your heart, it may be the case that eating hard-boiled eggs regularly is even better.

There Are Tons Of Hacks For How To Peel Hard-Boiled Eggs

Peeling many eggs at once - batjaket/Shutterstock

While hard-boiled eggs are a super convenient source of protein that can be eaten on the go or added to just about any meal, they're not always easy to peel. From sharp eggshell pieces getting lodged under your fingernail (ouch!) and the slippery membrane being hard to remove to large chunks of egg white sticking to the pieces of shell you peel off, the whole process can easily go sideways. Luckily, it seems that just about everyone has a hack for how to easily peel a hard-boiled egg.

From cracking and peeling them underwater or shaking them all together in a container, to using a spoon, tape, or any number of egg-peeling gadgets, there's no shortage of tactics for getting a perfectly smooth hard-boiled egg without all the hassles that come with peeling them. No matter the method, however, virtually none is foolproof. That's right, we said it. No matter how you choose to peel your hard-boiled eggs, sometimes the egg is just going to be hard to peel.

How Hard They Are To Peel May Be An Indicator Of Freshness

poorly peeled boiled egg - Olga Mazina/Shutterstock

Why, with all our advances in cooking and science (and the science of cooking) can't we get a perfectly peeled hard-boiled egg every time? The answer may be in the freshness of your eggs and it is related to that annoying, sticky membrane that is sometimes a real pain to remove from your hard-boiled egg.

While most foods are at their best when they're at their freshest, fresh eggs are notoriously harder to peel. According to Margaret Hudson, the president and CEO of Burnbrae Farms, fresh egg whites are much more likely to stick to the membrane on the inner shell of the egg when they're boiled because fresher egg whites are more acidic. As the egg ages, however, the acidity decreases and the space between the egg white and that sticky membrane increases, making it less likely your boiled egg will stick to the shell.

For the easiest peeling experience, let your farm-fresh eggs sit in the refrigerator for a week or two before you boil them.

Their Shelf-Life May Not Be As Long As You Think

eggs in refrigerator - Cookelma/Getty Images

If you've ever noticed a bag of hard-boiled eggs in the refrigerated section of the grocery store, you may have assumed it's an indication hard-boiled eggs last a pretty long time. After all, how fast can those things really sell?

There is a lot of confusion surrounding expiration dates and what they really mean, but according to the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), raw eggs from the grocery store are typically safe to eat for three to five weeks from the time you bring them home if they're properly refrigerated (even if their printed expiration date passes during this period). Interestingly, the freshness period for raw eggs might be even longer for eggs you buy at a farm stand or that you get from chickens you've raised yourself. While commercially available eggs are always washed due to federal regulations, unwashed eggs actually stay fresh longer (for weeks, even without refrigeration!), according to the Livestock Project at Iowa State University.

Regardless of how you store your fresh eggs, however, according to the USDA, hard-boiled eggs expire much more quickly than their fresh counterparts and are only safe to eat for about a week in the refrigerator.

The Tradition Of Eating Hard-Boiled Eggs Goes Back Centuries

18th century woman eating egg - Heritage Images/Getty Images

Given the long history of domesticated poultry, it's probably unsurprising that people have been eating eggs for a very long time, but you may be surprised to learn that hard-boiled eggs in particular date back centuries. According to Dr. Karen Carr, Associate Professor Emerita in the Department of History at Portland State University, the invention of pottery at around 5000 BC is what led to the very first hard-boiled eggs.

From that point forward, hard-boiled eggs were a staple in a multitude of cultures and cuisines in eras ranging from Ancient Rome and Egypt to Medieval Europe and the Italian Renaissance. The applications were numerous, just as they are today: served as a garnish for salads, on their own and dressed with sauces, or chopped and mixed with other ingredients were all popular ways to eat hard-boiled eggs throughout these multitude regions. Louis XV was even said to eat boiled eggs every Sunday. If they're good enough for Louis the Beloved, they're good enough for us!

Before Hard-Boiled Eggs, There Was Another Way People Cooked Their Eggs In The Shell

line of ash roasted eggs - Iker Zabaleta/Shutterstock

While hard-boiled eggs were necessarily preceded by the invention of pottery so that there was a vessel in which to boil them, it was not the first way eggs were cooked in their shells. Ash-roasted eggs go back much further than hard-boiled eggs because all that was needed to cook them was the hot coals from a fire. Though the exact timeline of how long they've been eaten is unclear (Dr. Karen Carr says they go back a million years while "Top Chef Canada judge Chris Nuttall-Smith told the Good Food podcast that he thinks their origin is Ancient Rome), it's clear that eggs cooked in their shell have a long and storied history and making them is incredibly easy.

To make ash-roasted eggs, Nuttall-Smith explained on the podcast, "You take an egg, you poke a little hole in the top to let expanding air come out so your eggs don't explode, and you just stick them in warm ashes from your fire. You stick them in about two-thirds of the way. It usually takes about six to 10 minutes and you get such a gorgeous, soft or hard-boiled egg, however you like it."

A Green Yolk Is Safe To Eat

boiled egg with green yolk - Audreycmk/Shutterstock

Just because making hard-boiled eggs is relatively easy, that doesn't mean that they always come out perfectly as planned. Most conventional wisdom dictates that to make perfect hard-boiled eggs you just need to cover your eggs with cold water and a little salt, bring them to a rolling boil, and then remove them from the heat and let them sit, covered, for around 15 minutes. That said, not everyone agrees on either the strategy or the exact timing for a perfect hard-boiled egg.

The problem with a cooking method that not everyone agrees on is that while it seems straightforward, it's also very easy to overcook a hard-boiled egg. When this happens, the normally yellow or orange yolk of your hard-boiled egg can come out with a strange, offputting green tinge. According to the USDA, it's the product of a chemical reaction of iron and sulfur when a hard-boiled egg is cooked for too long. While this is not exactly appetizing, it's perfectly safe.

The Color Of Their Shell Doesn't Impact Their Nutrition

woman peeling boiled egg - Pixel-Shot/Shutterstock

Though hard-boiled eggs can have shells that are white, brown, or even a light shade of green or blue, this is really just a product of the breed of hen that laid the egg. Despite this fact, and research that has shown that there's no nutritional difference between the different colored eggshells, somewhere along the way people got the idea that brown eggs are healthier than white eggs (and that the exotic-looking green and blue eggs are even healthier). The origin of this myth can most likely be attributed to two factors: brown eggs cost more than white egg,s and healthy food tends to be more expensive than less healthy food.

This is a classic case of a logical fallacy called the fallacy of the undistributed middle where people assume that just because two things are true for a specific reason a third, related thing must also be true for the same reason. In fact, brown eggs are more expensive for a relatively simple reason: the breeds that lay them are bigger so they require more feed and therefore their eggs cost more. The more you know.

Read the original article on Daily Meal.

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Screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker Explains Why Michael Fassbender Eats All Those Hard-Boiled Eggs In David Fincher's 'The Killer'

Courtesy of Netflix

Screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker's first produced screenplay was Se7en, which became director David Fincher's breakout film. Since then Walker has worked with Fincher a number of times, pitching in on The Game and "polishing the edges" of Jim Uhls' original script for Fight Club. But not everything they've collaborated on more recently has made it to the big screen. Walker did a rewrite on the unmade sequel to The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and one on a Fincher version of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea that Walker says could have been "mind-blowing."

After these and other false starts, a new Fincher/Walker project has finally come to fruition: The Killer, out in theaters this weekend and on Netflix next week. "There's no way to express proper gratitude to this gentleman David Fincher, and the effect he's had on my life," Walker says. "But it is fun to now be able to go, 'Hey, David and I have been trying to get to this for a long time. Thank you. Go see this, because this one isn't the only one we've been spending years trying to write.'"

The movie, based on the French comics series, stars Michael Fassbender as a meticulous assassin whose routine is disturbed when he accidentally kills the wrong person. It feels like retro Fincher—the Fincher of The Game. The engine of the movie is Fassbender's unnamed character's voiceover, a litany of occupational mantras that the Killer's actions sometimes contradict.

Walker remembers Fincher first contacting him about the project in 2008, and during our Zoom interview he pulls out notes from that meeting, in which the filmmaker walked him through the beats he wanted to hit on screen. Now, 15 years later, he discusses how they finally brought this nasty little gem of a movie to life.

GQ: Se7en was a script that you wrote and then he came on to, and then you've done rewrites on other Fincher projects. Do you feel like you know what he's going to like and can write to that?

Andrew Kevin Walker: I feel an unusual amount of kismet, if that's the word. I do remember times when I was working on rewriting The Game, it really was like you would say something and he would finish the sentence or vice versa. I don't know why, and I don't want to think about it too much, because it is kind of an inexorably wonderful thing.

When he came onto Se7en, I had vastly rewritten it for [director] Jeremiah Chechick who was attached before David. The story that's out there is a true story—that they came to David with Se7en and they accidentally gave him the first draft. When he was talking to them later down the line, he said, "blah, blah, blah, head in the box." And they said, "Oh, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait—we sent you the wrong one." He insisted on going back to the first draft.

When I sat down with him and met him, I kind of dutifully got my little composition book out—it's weird, but I do write in John Doe composition books. And I was kind of licking my pencil and getting ready and he was just like, No, no—go ahead and close the notebook, and let's just talk about the script from the very beginning.

I keep waiting for the moment where I write a script and he just reads it and he goes, "Oh my God, this is so disappointing. I hate it."

After he gave you the beats of The Killer, did you go back to the original material at all?

I did revisit the comics. The biggest thing for me in adapting the literal kind of voice that's in the comics is: I was concerned about not making the Killer seem like he was doing this morally reprehensible stuff, but at the same time in his mind feeling morally superior. I read The Stranger, the Camus book. A lot of Nietzsche. There's an alien kind of quality, in my opinion, to the Killer, where he's almost kind of in a spaceship hovering low. A nicely edited, stripped-down-by-Fincher version of that exists early on, when he's saying, "It's not that I feel superior, I just feel apart." The [character description] in the script was kind of, "If you're really paying attention, you'll see that he never blinks, but who would pay attention to that?" And I just love that they, and especially Fassbender, ran with that.

What was your process in writing the voiceover monologue that opens the film?

Hopefully the first act, or the first 20 or so minutes, is going to do something that I really like to try to do, which is subvert the audience's expectations. The process was to rigorously show process. At a certain point, Steven Soderbergh weighed in on one of the cuts, while Fincher was processing and reorganizing some things. And one of the results of him weighing in on it was [Fincher] moving the line "If you can't stand boredom, then this isn't the work for you." It was a nice way to kind of warn the audience like, This ain't going to start at a breakneck pace. I love making the audience experience the same kind of tedium and meticulousness that this person doing this job would need to have acquired.

The other line that I remember, hopefully, being kind of artfully placed to let the audience subtly know what's going on, was in Se7en when Morgan [Freeman]'s character says, "This isn't going to have a happy ending." The audience may or may not believe it when they're watching it the first time, but then they may remember and go, "Oh yeah, he did say…"

From the very beginning, Fincher said, "There's this voiceover mantra." And after a while, he's saying, No regrets or remorse, but he clearly feels a certain remorse over one person, or he's clearly doing this all for emotional reasons when it comes to his girlfriend. But Fincher, also from the very beginning, said, "This will be a movie where the guy literally says maybe 10 lines of spoken dialogue." Anything else would be voiceover. And I really took that to heart, and I did get it down to literally 13, like a baker's dozen in the first draft of spoken lines.

But then Fincher had him occasionally say, "Put the room service cart over here" or saying thank you to someone. And I was just like, "Stop doing that. You're adding more lines." Those mumbled lines here and there, I guess don't count, but that was an important part of the process.

I was wondering where all the little quirks of the character came in, like the fact that he really only consumes protein, throwing away the buns on a McMuffin and swallowing hard-boiled eggs from a package. Or that his pseudonyms are all classic TV characters, like Felix Unger from The Odd Couple and Archie Bunker from All in the Family.

I mean, the ID stuff—when we worked on Fight Club together, we knew that there had to be name tags and kind of signup sheets for Edward [Norton]'s character, the Narrator. We started using names from Planet of the Apes. This time around as I was writing, I just realized, "Oh God, we're never going to know his name, right? [He's just] The Killer—but he's going to have to be giving his information to a lot of people, especially when he's flying." I had to make a decision: Do I have to make up a different name every single time?

I decided upon this use of names that—for people of a certain age down—will mean nothing. For people of a certain age up, it's almost kind of like a little Easter-egg hunt. Collect them all. And I do love that some 56 year old guy is sitting there chuckling beside some youngster who's just like, "What the fuck is this guy laughing about every 10 minutes?"

Well, I'm not a 56-year-old guy, but I was laughing.

Good. Thank you. And then you kind of have to go through on the second, hopefully and third or whatever viewing, and you go, oh, wait, I missed that one—Reuben Kincaid. But I mean, again, that was part of the passing back and forth. It used to be just spoken names, and Fincher really zeroed in on making sure every one of the names was shown, so that it registered a little more.

His way of consuming food in an efficient way as part of the process was part of me envisioning him as kind of an alien amongst us. It's amazing to me that you can buy hard-boiled eggs wrapped in plastic and just cut out the middleman. But the way it was in one of the original drafts, at a certain point he had a really hot Starbucks coffee and he was sitting, like waiting or driving. I had him a crack a raw egg into the coffee, so the coffee would kind of cook the egg, and then he just drank the whole thing. If anything, I wish there was a little more of him eating.

There were a lot of hit man movies at the fall festivals this year, The Killer and Richard Linklater's Hit Man among them. Do you wrestle with the iconography of the genre when you are writing it or do you try to put that aside?

I think about it only in that it is a familiar genre and it's been done really well. I think that it's [about] bending of problems into solutions. When you try and ground an unreal thing in reality, that's when the problems bend into solutions. It becomes interesting when an international professional assassin picks the seat in coach that's as deep in the plane as possible, because he needs to disappear into the woodwork. When he doesn't dine now on pheasant under glass and drink the finest champagne or insist that his cocktails are shaken, not stirred, and he's eating hard-boiled eggs and he's just being efficient, that's when you've bent the expectation as well into hopefully an area of interesting storytelling that takes tropes, and hopefully, I say again, hopefully plays with them enough to keep it interesting. But yeah, I was aware of that kind of stuff. I just knew that we weren't going to be doing certain things that we had seen before.

Originally Appeared on GQ

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Spooky Deviled Eggs

Jessica serves up some spook-tacular deviled eggs with the perfect Halloween twist. Ingredients: • Eggs • Red Food Coloring • Green Food Coloring • 2 tbsp Mayonnaise • 1 tbsp Dijon Mustard Instructions: • Add eggs to a pot of cold water. • Bring water to a boil. • As soon as it boils, turn off heat, put on lid and allow eggs to sit for 6-8 minutes. • Drain eggs and run under cold water, then crack shells all over with a spoon. • Add red food coloring to pot with water and add eggs back in. • Refrigerate overnight. • Remove eggs and peel shells. • Cut eggs in half • Remove yolk with a spoon and add yolks to a bowl • Add mayonnaise, Dijon or yellow mustard, salt, pepper to egg yolks and mix with fork. • Add green food coloring or a combination of yellow and blue food coloring to give it a green spooky look. • Add yolk mixture to a piping bag and fill your eggs. • Sprinkle with salt and pepper. Happy Halloween!

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