This three-digit rule for cooking soft-boiled, soft-boiled or hard-boiled eggs will change your life!
We like eggs soft-boiled for breakfast, hard-boiled in a nice salad or a sandwich, soft-boiled when combined with beets, lentils, asparagus or in ramen… But there you have it, it’s never easy to cook them perfectly when you trust your hazardous instinct. There is nothing worse than hard or soft-boiled eggs that are a little overcooked, or conversely, soft-boiled eggs that are much too runny. Still haven’t found the right cooking time for your eggs, whatever the recipe? However, there is a very simple mathematical rule to memorize for safe cooking of your eggs. Read the following lines carefully.
Culinary professionals know it well: the perfect cooking of eggs follows a simple rule of multiplication by 3: the rule of 3-6-9. For ideal cooking of soft-boiled eggs, allow 3 minutes. The time it takes for the white to cook sufficiently while keeping the yolk flowing inside. You will be able to enjoy moist fingers perfectly soaked in a melting and tasty yellow liquid. Please note, for this to work well, remember to take your eggs out of the fridge 10 minutes before cooking, so that they can plunge into boiling water when they are at room temperature.
For soft-boiled eggs, double the cooking time: 6 minutes! The perfect in-between to obtain half-cooked, half-melty eggs. But be careful, we start the timer from the moment the boiling resumes. After 6 minutes, remove the egg using a slotted spoon and instantly refresh it under cold water.
Finally, to obtain a hard-boiled egg without the white being elastic and rubbery and the yolk powdery and dry, it takes 9 minutes. Remember to carefully place your eggs in the pan and cover them with cold water by at least an inch, with a lid. Start the timer to boil. Drain and rinse immediately under cold water to prevent a green ring from forming around the yolk. Remove the shell after cooling.
There you go, you know everything now. With this technique, you will never again have to worry about cooking your eggs perfectly. But there is a “but” and you will have understood it: this simple rule of 3-6-9 applies to medium-sized eggs and provided that they are at room temperature. If the egg has just come out of the fridge or if it is a large free-range type egg, you will need to cook for an additional 30 seconds to 1 minute.