What About This? By Wayne William Cipriano

From breakfast to baking, we use a lot of eggs. When a wonderful lady gave us a dozen and a half of her chickens’ production, we used almost all of them in one day – breakfasting and baking, and hard-boiling a couple for salads.

But, whenever you hard boil an egg, and seriously increase the number of ways it can be used, you must face the chore of removing the shell.

We have heard of many, many ways to remove egg shells after boiling and tried just about every one with limited success: boil in various media, peel them hot, peel them cold, shock them first in ice water, perforate them before boiling, crack them sharply, crack them gently, roll to crack, use salt in the boiling water, use baking soda in the boiling water, and so on…and on.

Some methods sounded silly and proved to be so after we tried them, but, hey, you have got to be scientific about this stuff and give each hypothesis a test. Isn’t that how we found how delicious bananas and peanut butter is?

We have finally encountered a method for shell removal that is simple, quick,  and 100% effective. It came from Rosalie perushing Facebook. You’d think that considering our combined ages, and the fact that one of us spends a lot of time studying food preparation information in all media from print to motion pictures, we would have run across this method a long time ago, but we didn’t.

The method is of such excellence, that I considered mailing it, free of charge to anyone interested once they had sent me their address printed on the back of a twenty-dollar bill. The Publisher of the Herald, long known for the free, (or almost free) dissemination of newsworthy information, frowned on my idea and ‘suggested’ the method be tramsmitted in full here. It is a wise man who realizes which suggestions to follow and which to ignore. Here is the method:

First, you boil the eggs in whaever medium you wish for as long as you wish – it doesn’t matter. Then you remove the eggs from the medium while they are hot, warm, or cold – it doesn’t matter. Lay the eggs on a hard surface and roll each under our flattened palm until they are cracked a little or a lot –it doesn’t matter.

Now, you need equipment: a small container that comfortably holds an egg and an ounce or two of water and has a tightly fitting top. We used a small circular Tupperware container about 4 inches in diameter and 1-1/2 inches deep. Any container like that will do–it doesn’t matter.

You put the egg with a cracked shell into the container, throw in a little water, and shake. If you have a spouse underfoot looking for something to do, there’s your shaker. We tried using a sugared-up seven-year-old, but overenthusiasm is a problem.

After the container with the boiled egg and some water has been sealed, shake it for 4 or 5 seconds –this does matter as you can destroy the shelled egg by overshaking, as we discovered with the kid.

Open the container and whatever shell remains on the egg will peel off fabulously easily! You can shell a dozen boiled eggs in less than two minutes. Time yourself and see.

The shells can be thrown in the garden, left for nocturnal animals, or tossed with the rest of your garbage. You can demonstrate your understandable gratitude cigar-ly.

If you already knew about this method, why didn’t you share it by having it published in the “Letters to the Editor” section of the Herald? It was your civic duty.