The art of peeling a hard-boiled egg is one that people seem to take quite personally. It’s an inexplicable phenomenon where everyone on planet Earth has to do it differently, and so-called foolproof methods don’t seem to work for everyone. It’s like reaching enlightenment when you finally crack the code, when karma bestows upon you your “perfect method.” Mine involves steaming a hard-boiled egg and dunking it in cold water. It peels like a dream every time. But like the sun rising each day, a new method has come my way: boiling eggs in oily water for easy peeling. Does it work? I grabbed a few jars to find out.

Because egg cooking can vary greatly in time, cold start versus boil start, or how to cool it down, egg cooking tests can quickly get out of hand with the details. This particular method comes from Tasting Table and leaves everything up to the user, except for the simple addition of oil. Simply add a tablespoon of oil (which you can later pour down the sink) to the pot of water and bring to a boil. Then add the eggs and cook as you normally would. According to the post, the oil will seep through the porous shell of the egg and "separate the shell from the membrane and the egg…" If this is the case, then an egg that has been brushed with oil to ensure an even coating should also do just fine when placed in boiling water.

It seems reasonable, so I set up three pots of water. Each pot had water in it and I set it to boil. In one pot with a tablespoon of canola oil I would get an egg, in the other pot without oil I would get an egg that I had rubbed with oil, and the last pot was the control with no oil in the water or on the egg.

The method didn’t specify what temperature to start the eggs at, so I used refrigerator-cold eggs. One egg cracked when it hit the boiling water due to thermal shock. It was obvious that that egg would peel differently than the others, so I added a second egg to the pan that didn’t crack. I boiled the eggs for nine minutes each and removed them to cool on plates.