Jacques Pépin's Spinning Trick Ensures Your Hard-Boiled Eggs Are Ready To Eat

There are many ways to hard-boil and peel an egg, but once you've cracked it open, there's no turning back. So you'll want to find a foolproof method to ensure your hard-boiled eggs are perfectly cooked, even before they're peeled. Thankfully, legendary chef and Julia Child Award recipient Jacques Pépin offered a simple solution: Spin your boiled eggs.  All you need is a tabletop, and anyone with basic top-spinning skills can use this tip.

At the 2018 Food and Wine Classic in Aspen, Pépin — who knows a thing or two about eggs — demonstrated how a raw egg barely spins before being boiled. However, once cooked, a hard-boiled egg will spin until it stands upright like a top. This occurs because a hard-boiled egg is completely solid inside, allowing it to spin at the same rate as its shell and maintain its balance. In contrast, a raw egg contains fluids, making it unstable at the center and preventing it from spinning consistently with its shell. 

The conflicting and often opposite motions of the shell and the egg's liquid center result in a wobbly spin, which keeps a raw egg from standing upright. Furthermore, unlike a hard-boiled egg, a raw egg won't stop spinning immediately when tapped lightly. This indicates that the contents are still in liquid form, swirling at its center — a bonus tip to further ensure your eggs are ready to eat (or not)!

There's an even simpler way to check if your hard-boiled eggs are ready — though it may not be as exciting as spinning them. Just hold the boiled egg to your ear and shake it. If you hear a liquid-like sound, the egg is raw; if there's no sound, it's ready. However, with this method, you'll need to pay close attention. Factors such as temperature can affect the results, which means you might barely notice a difference in sound when shaking a raw egg compared to a hard-boiled one.

If you enjoy science experiments and don't mind adding a bit of extra equipment to your kitchen tests, the flashlight hack for checking if hard-boiled eggs are ready is perfect. First, turn off any lights in the room. Then, with a flashlight in one hand and an egg in the other, shine the flashlight on the egg. If the beam from the flashlight illuminates the egg from within, it means that the egg is raw. A hard-boiled egg will not light up in this manner, because its solid center prevents any light from passing through.

Keep in mind that these experiments will not determine if your boiled egg is fully cooked. So the best way to ensure that an egg is indeed hard-boiled is to combine the experiments; that way, you'll further minimize the chances of ending up with a soft-boiled egg. However, if you do end up with a soft-boiled egg, you can always upgrade your favorite potato salad with it; you won't regret it!