I cooked an egg in my Instant Pot for 3 hours

it smells great in here

Hello, clowns!

Sorry I was MIA last week. I had a mouth issue that made it really hard for me to think about eating for a while. It’s hard to operate the worst food newsletter in the world if I can’t taste my own horrendous cooking, you know? I’m still waiting to get checked out, so we’ll see what happens. Wish me luck, since I’m terrified of all things dental.

Ugh. Back to it.

This week, I’ve decided to tackle a frequently talked about cooking issue: How long to hard boil eggs.

I don’t eat hard boiled eggs often, but every now and then I’ll have a serious craving. I’ll boil a bunch, then make Japanese egg salad (which is basically just eggs and Kewpie mayo). Then Davida and I will get about a week’s worth of cholesterol in one sandwich. A few whole eggs will also disappear up my ass and never come out.

Now the issue is, I’m not very good at remembering how long to boil an egg. I have written about food for around 10 years, and every time I do it, I have to google it. And just like anyone else, I’m always concerned about overcooking the egg. There’s nothing worse than a nasty hard boiled egg with a green yolk, aside from maybe a head wound. They smell funny, then the yolk gets dry, crumbly, and mealy. So does a head wound.

Some people swear by different methods, like boiling an egg starting in cold water, then taking it off the heat. Others dunk the egg straight into boiling water and cook it for some magical amount of time. And some people use handy gadgets, like an egg cooker or an Instant Pot.

But then I thought, “Dannis, it seems silly that people get so mad about cooking eggs. Is overcooking eggs really that bad?”

“Wait a second,” I said to myself. “What if you really, really, overcook a hard boiled egg? When people overcook eggs, it’s only by a few minutes here or there. But what would happen if you boiled an egg for three hours? And how about in an Instant Pot, under extremely high pressure?”

Hold onto your diapers, everyone.

Everyone, please say hello to our new friend, John.

John drove over from outer space, where he shoots at aliens and waves his hands like he just doesn’t care. He wanted to be part of the egg experiment today. In fact, he even brought an egg with him.

Harvey and Mr. Bee are delighted they have a new friend.

They actually don’t give a shit about John, they just like the fact that he has a car. He let them drive it around for a while as he raised the roof in the back. Everyone had a good time until Mr. Bee drove the Warthog off the side of the couch.

I started by placing one lonely egg in my Instant Pot.

Since an Instant Pot uses steam to cook, you need a decent amount of water at the bottom. It’s hard to see in that picture, but it’s there. I briefly considered putting John in the Instant Pot too, but he’s a houseguest. That’s not a good way to treat a new friend.

Then, I set the Instant Pot up to cook at high pressure for three whole hours.

I’m actually kind of shocked the thing lets you set it for that long. I didn’t check to see the maximum time it’d let itself run for, but in pressure cooker time, three hours is an eternity. For reference, if you’re using your Instant Pot to make a hard boiled egg, you only need five minutes. Three hours is 36 times that amount.

As the Instant Pot came up to pressure, I put a pair of eggs in my Dutch oven with some cold water.

The eggs immediately started farting some small bubbles. Then I sat around and waited.

Every now and then I checked on the eggs in the Dutch oven, which were rolling around as the water bubbled up around them.

They looked fine. The water evaporated quickly so I had to refill it occasionally, which is natural when you boil something on high for three goddamn hours. I wasn’t quite prepared for our apartment to turn into a sauna, though. The insides of our windows fogged up and I felt all my pores opening up. Then I hired a hairy Turkish guy to come beat the shit out of me with wet tree branches.

I’m assuming not all of you have Instant Pots.

In case you’ve never used one, once the pressure cooker is finished cooking, you have two options. You can either manually release the steam pressure by opening a vent on top, which is terrifying and potentially injurious, or you can let the pot cool off naturally before opening it up.

I let the pressure come down on its own for about 30 minutes. I cooked the eggs for three hours already, why rush a good thing, you know?

The lone egg came out intact.

It wasn’t cracked or discolored in any way. It looked like any old egg. I briefly cooled it off in some cold water, then I started peeling it on the kitchen counter. But once part of the shell was removed, it was clear that this was no ordinary egg.

Instead of emerging from the shell a pearly white, the hard boiled egg was a strange hue of pinkish brown.

I looked at the thing and immediately busted out laughing. Aside from deliberately marinating or dying an egg, I’ve never seen one this color before. It smelled a little funny, not quite as sulfuric as I’d imagined it would, but it did smell a little…different. I’m not entirely sure how to explain it. I know that’s useless, but it had a deeper eggy intensity I can’t quite put into words.

The pinkish brown color was uniform throughout the egg white, while the yolk just looked overcooked.

It had that thin green layer you get on the outside when over-boiling an egg, but the color didn’t really penetrate into the yolk at all. The smell was still slightly intense, but if even if you were blindfolded, you’d still be able to identify the scent as a hard boiled egg. Maybe partially rotten.

I sprinkled it with a little salt and cautiously took a bite.

The egg white (or brown) wasn’t much different from a normal boiled egg, and the yolk was dry and crumbly, as you can see. But the flavor was subtly different from a typical hard boiled egg. It had sort of a metallic finish, and the longer it went on, the more it tasted like cat food. It was very bizarre. Then I wondered if I’d poisoned myself.

The three-hour boiled egg came out a visibly lighter shade of brown that was more khaki than pink.

Note that both of these eggs peeled perfectly, too. The shell slipped right off of each with zero tearing or sticking.

The boiled egg is on the left, the pressure cooked one is on the right

As you can see, the colors were noticeably different.

Not only was the boiled egg less brown, the yolk was a lighter shade of yellow, too.

If anything it just tasted like an overcooked egg.

It didn’t have that weird lingering cat food aftertaste, like the three-hour Instant Pot one. For comparison’s sake, I tried the pressure cooked egg again. Ugh. Yup, cat food. It made me wonder what would happen if I maxed out the Instant Pot and cooked an egg for 12 centuries.

So next time you’re ever wondering if you’ve overcooked a hard boiled egg, don’t worry. Unless it’s a laugh-inducing shade of brown, you’re fine.

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Okay, everyone. As always, I love you all, and I’ll hop into your inboxes soon. Invite some friends along for the ride. And punt a football up my ass.