How to Hard Boil Eggs Using an Immersion Circulator

We’ve all had a bad hard-boiled egg or two (or five) in our life. And the worst kind of hard-boiled egg? One with a dry, powdery yolk reminiscent of that time your 6-year-old brain decided it was a good idea to eat sidewalk chalk. It’s enough to turn one off of hard-set eggs forever — but it doesn’t have to be that way.

Part of the problem with boiling eggs is that you can’t control the little fluctuations in temperature that can turn a good egg into a bad egg within a matter of seconds. But using an immersion circulator, or sous vide, gives you complete control over the water temperature, resulting in perfect hard-boiled — er, hard-cooked — eggs, every single time.

Another benefit to using the immersion circulator is that the eggs cook up relatively quickly. At a circulator temperature of 192.5°, they’ll be ready for their ice bath in a mere 25 minutes. (However, as we mention in our Home Cook’s Guide to Perfect Eggs with an Immersion Circulator, you get the same results cooking the eggs at 170° for an hour, which, in our experience, can be nice if you have a mountain of laundry to fold or a gaggle of kids to wrangle.)

But of course, the main reason to use the immersion circulator is that it makes a hard-cooked egg like none other. The yolk is set and firm, but still moist, with a pleasantly mellow flavor — and the entirety of the white is opaque and tender, not at all rubbery. There’s also no suspicious gray-green ring around the yolk (something we always find a little unsettling). Oh, and the peeling! It’s so satisfying. The shell sheds off the white like slow-cooked meat falls off the bone, leaving you with a pristine, crater-free egg.

We love using sous vide hard-cooked eggs for everything from deli-style egg salad to deviled eggs to salade Niçoise — all of the classics. It’s also never a bad idea to have a handful of them in the fridge for breakfast or mid-morning snacks. And come Easter, we’ll definitely be getting out our immersion circulators: you can cook a ton of eggs all at once for dyeing and scavenger-hunting with the kiddos!

Yield: 12 hard-boiled eggs

Ingredients

12 Gelson’s pasture-raised eggs

Directions

1. Fill a large pot with warm water, set your immersion circulator to 192.5°, and allow the water to come up to temperature. This can take 5 to 10 minutes. If your water isn’t getting warm enough, cover the top of the pot with plastic wrap.

2. Using a slotted spoon, gently place 12 eggs in the bottom of the pot and set the timer for 25 minutes.

3. With about 5 minutes remaining, make an ice bath in a large mixing bowl with half ice and half cold water.

4. Using a slotted spoon, gently remove the eggs from the hot water and place them in the ice bath, making sure they are fully submerged. Allow to chill for 10 minutes.

5. To peel the eggs, hold them upright and tap the wide bottom on the counter, working your way up both of the sides. There will be a small air pocket on the bottom of the egg — start peeling there, and then completely remove the shell.

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