I am forever surprised by how many different ways you can cook and eat eggs. Within the scrambled genre alone, I have three favourites (super slow, whipped with a blender, and blended with cheese). Recently, I’ve been really into the hard bois. I love devilling them (obviously), and wrapping them in miso, but I am now fully obsessed with these toasty, nutty, oh-so-tender seven hour eggs. (Spoiler: they do not actually take seven hours.)
You may have seen these dark tan, hardboiled eggs referred to as “Korean sauna eggs,” or perhaps “huevos haminados” if you are familiar with Sephardic cooking, but they are, essentially, eggs that have been cooked a really long time.
According to Harold McGee’s On Food and Cooking, this is a long-term cooking process in which “the quarter-gram of glucose sugar in the white reacts with albumen protein to generate flavours and pigments typical of browned foods.” This means your egg tastes toasted, which is wild, if I’m being honest. The white is also insanely tender, while the yolk is creamy and almost fluffy in texture.
I’d imagine that very few people want to boil eggs for seven hours but, seeing as we are living in the age of the pressure cooker, you can make these toasty, rich egg treats in under two. To make them, you will need:
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Eggs — as many as will fit in a single layer in the bottom of your pressure cooker insert
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Water — enough to cover the eggs
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2 teaspoons of kitchen salt
Let the eggs come to room temperature for about an hour — this will help prevent cracking during cooking — then place them in the pressure cooker insert.
Cover them with water, add the salt and close the pot, making sure the release valve is set to “sealing” or an equivalent setting. Press “pressure cook”, make sure you’re set to high pressure, and set the time to 90 minutes.
After the cooking time has elapsed, release the pressure manually, (carefully) remove the hot eggs from the insert — use tongs — and set them in an ice bath until they are fully cool to the touch.
Peel ‘em, eat ‘em, maybe devil them. (I see an egg, I devil an egg. That’s just how I am.)
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