Wasting Eggs

2025-11-12

I must admit, I dont really need to admit it but I want to, that I have gotten pretty good at boiling eggs. I am pretty scientific / engineering minded when I bake or cook and boiling eggs fall into this category. I remember as a kid my mom would bring eggs from room temp up to boiling and then peel them for our egg salad sandwiches. I used to do that, and eventually I switched to putting eggs into boiling water since it worked better and was easier to control. Finally I learned from this video ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hb0Elaa6gxY ) to use steam to boil eggs. And I boil a bunch of eggs every week, our boys love hard boiled eggs, and have gotten good at it.

And then this week rolled around and there is a new Instagram trend where people make Korean eggs (Sneha called them drug eggs but that sounds silly). Here is a video ( https://www.instagram.com/reel/DFydpeiy6GJ/?hl=en ). And these look good, they remind me of Taiwanese tea eggs that my old friend’s parents used to make. Anyway this recipe looks great and Sneha wanted to make them.

And she followed some recipe that she found, brought a pan of water to a boil, put the eggs in the pan for 7 minutes, and then took them out and put them in an ice bath. After they cooled we tried to peel them and couldn’t, we ripped about large chunks of the white while peeling and the eggs were ruined. I think we wasted 4 out of the 8 eggs we made. And the interesting thing was Sneha was furious. I think she has a strong scarcity mindset and so wasting money or food is very unacceptable. Not to brag but I boiled two more eggs with my method for 6 minutes and they were perfect, very jammy inside.

And to calculate, I think that we buy 24 eggs at Costco for $9. That makes it $0.375 per egg, so Sneha wasted $1.50. It is not nothing but it is pretty small. But Sneha can’t waste anything. And so this week I realized I have a much high tolerance for loss than Sneha, a high risk appetite. I can lose some money, a hundred dollars even, but if I learn a lesson sometimes it can be worth it. We learned this week how not to boil eggs, and we wont make this mistake again. Also we learned this fun new Korean egg recipe that tastes great, you cant make an omelette unless you break a few eggs.

-Gary