Quick fix: Hard-boiled egg bagel

Hard-boiled eggs on a bagel. With cheese.

Hard-boiled eggs are delightfully simple. All you really need to hard-boil an egg is about 15 minutes, some boiling water and an egg. They are also fairly filling and can be utilized in a number of dishes such as deviled eggs and egg salad.

If you happen to be pressed for time or don’t have/like mayonnaise, just slice the egg thin and put it on some sort of bread. Maybe something like…leftover bagels. The egg bagels (Eggels?) to the right are simple; a cut and toasted bagel with a piece of cheese, one sliced, hard-boiled egg and some salt and pepper.

They make for a fairly substantial lunch and are easy. Plus you can add just about anything you want. A slice of tomato, light mayonnaise and some spinach would be good. Add a piece of goetta or bacon and you have a breakfast sandwich. Some chipotle ranch dressing and leftover chicken breast, maybe. The world is your oyster. Make a seafood bagel.

If you have never made a hard-boiled egg, fear not. I have. A hard-boiled egg will keep for a while, so you might as well make a few. Set your egg(s), shell intact, in a pot with at least enough water to cover them. Turn the stove on and get the pot up to a nice rolling boil. Depending on how fast your stove is it should take about 10 minutes (or a little less) of boiling to cook the egg through. They will be very, very hot.

The egg is less likely to crack due to sudden temperature change if you have it in the pot as it starts to boil. Adding an egg to a pot of boiling water can result in cracking and an annoying mess.

Set the eggs aside until they cool and put them back in the fridge until you need them. If you’re into instant gratification and want your egg now, put it in a bowl of cold water in the freezer for a few minutes.

There are a few ways to approach cracking a hard-boiled egg. If you don’t care whether or not it stays intact, just crack and peel. My personal favorite is to grip the egg in one hand to make a fist, then punching my open palm. The egg will crack (or squash if you use too much force) and you’ll probably feel a little cooler. Assuming you do care about the look of the egg, a little more care would be wise.  There will be a space of air at the bottom of the egg called an air cell. That is a good place to start if you’re not used to peeling an egg. Crack that and do your best to peel the entire shell away with the thin white skin that will be attached to the shell.

Slicing an egg is fairly simple. I find it’s best to take a very sharp paring knife and just press it through the egg. Be careful not to press it through your finger as well. A cutting board would be ideal. The yoke will provide some resistance, but that shouldn’t cause too much trouble.

Edit:

(The Real) Chris is right. Adding a little salt to the water as you boil it will make peeling the egg easier. Also older eggs are apparently easier to peel (as opposed to farm-fresh).

Tags: Food, Lunch, Web

Gallery Update: Garlic and onion Bagels

Poppy seeds get everywhere, by the way.

You know, for this being a bread that was originally based on making bread there is not a lot of bread here. In fact, this is only the second gallery update dealing with bread, the first being Focaccia Pizza. Bagels are, in case you’ve never had one, delicious. They are my favorite ring-shaped food. Why I have waited this long to make them is a mystery to me.

Anyway, about the bagels. They’re easy to make. If you can make yeast bread you can make bagels. All you have to do is send them through some boiling water before you bake them. Simple work.

It should be clear to anyone who reads regularly (and apparently about 30 of you do) that I can’t be satisfied with simple things. Clearly I had to make garlic and onion bagels, not just plain white bread bagels. That’s boring and easy. I would recommend starting with the boring and easy, because I think I just get lucky most of the time. Adding the garlic is simple enough; just add garlic. The onion is a different story though.

I basically pulped the onion by sending it through a fine grater. The nice thing is that the onion doesn’t grate into strips. It just sort of turns to pulp. (That’s good. We want that.) To get rid of the excess juice I put the pulp in some paper towels and gave it a good squeeze until all I had was onion bits.

If you have never made bagels and are looking for some sort of bread to make, I would suggest it. The recipe posted over in the Food tab is just a basic recipe. Feel free to send me pictures of variations you make.

Tags: Food, Gallery