How to Boil Eggs

For something as theoretically simple as boiling eggs, there are too many articles online about how to do it. There should only be allowed one or maybe two articles, because then dumb people like me spend hours looking it up, and it turns out people get really particular about the little tweaks, and say different things, and it’s too confusing, and the eggs somehow end up boiled wrong or not boiled at all. Why can’t there be One Right Way to do it that everyone agrees on? In any case, here’s one way to do it.

1. Google “how to boil eggs.”

2. Read about boiling eggs for hours, for days. Some people like salt, some people use vinegar, some people keep the heat on, some people take it off, sometimes it’s for 12 minutes, sometimes for 15, some people put the eggs in when the water is cold, some people say to do it once it’s boiling, some people put a pin prick at the end, some people, some people, some people. Hot water, cold water, covered, etc. Why? Why so many ways? Who reads about it, and decides to change the main recipe? They’re just boiled eggs! Why! Why are they doing this?!

3. Buy pre-boiled eggs at Trader Joe’s for months, and feel totally fine about it until you get one batch that has some shell in it, and you eat a little shell, and now you always have to wash them and check for shell, which is a drag.

4. Google it again, and pick a website at random, and boil them that way. Crack one once they’re done, and see that it’s completely molten in the center. Try boiling them again. They are still molten, somehow (!?). Throw them all out, because you don’t want soft-boiled eggs. Do soft-boiled eggs keep in the refrigerator? Well, this is all for deviled eggs anyway, so it doesn’t matter. Stupid eggs. No, eggs are wonderful. It is me who is stupid. It is me who is stupid.

5. Google “how to boil eggs” again. The hyperlinks to so many sites are already purple, because you (I) have been to them before, many times. Again, there are so many. Who thinks their method of boiling eggs is so special and perfect that it warrants inclusion in the already overcrowded field of How to Boil Eggs tutorials? In fact, if you think about it, people who write How to Boil Eggs tutorials are actually making it harder for people who don’t know how to boil eggs to learn how to boil eggs. :-O

6. Pick one and follow it. End up with well boiled eggs, but it’s so difficult to get the shell off, even though you put them in the ice bath at the end. Why is it so complicated? Make deviled eggs. Buy eggs at Trader Joe’s going forward; none have the shell problem again.

7. Write a letter to your congressperson about removing some of the How to Boil Eggs tutorials from the internet, in the interest of actually helping people to boil eggs.

8. Write a How to Boil Eggs tutorial that isn’t actually one, in an effort to draw attention to this problem! Like a wolf in a sheep’s clothing — a campaign against egg-boiling instructions dressed up as an egg-boiling instructive.

9. See? This was annoying, but very important. It’s like those telephone poles that’re supposed to look like trees, so the birds aren’t frightened, or whatever it is those pole costumes are supposed to do. This will exist in the egg-boiling world until the problem is SOLVED.