Eggs are best kept out of the fridge in a cool larder, pointed end down. Aim to use them within a fortnight of buying them. Separated whites or yolks can be kept, covered, in a fridge for up to 24 hours.
I should say that current health and safety advice is to keep eggs in the fridge. However, if you do this take them out of the fridge an hour or two before you use them if you’re planning to boil them (otherwise the shell is more likely to crack on contact with the boiling water), or before baking. Also, don’t store them near anything smelly (such as onions) as the porous shells will absorb any strong smells.
Before you break an egg, you can still test whether it is fresh. An egg has an air space at the blunt end which gets bigger with age. So put it in a bowl of water and see what happens:
It lies flat on the bottom |
Fresh |
It stays on the bottom but |
Not so fresh |
It floats |
Break it open warily; it may be bad |
Once you’ve broken an egg open, a fresh egg will have a rounder yolk, and the white will cling to the yolk rather than running away from it.
Chef’s tip
If you get a small amount of yolk in your egg white, the easiest way to remove it is with a piece of eggshell.
It’s easy to do, especially if there’s more than one cook in the family – someone leaves an egg lying around the kitchen and you don’t know whether it has been cooked or not. All you have to do is spin it (not too close to the edge of the worksurface in case it turns out not to be cooked). If it spins evenly, it’s hard boiled. If the spin is wobbly, it’s uncooked.
As a double check put your finger on the egg to stop the spinning, and then remove it. If it starts spinning again slowly it must be raw – in other words the yolk and white inside haven’t quite stopped spinning independently so they restart when you lift your finger.
It’s just so tricky because you can’t actually look inside an egg to see how well cooked it is. The precise time depends of course in part on how hard you boil it. The following times assume that you put the egg in boiling water and bring it quickly back to a very gentle simmer. From that point, here’s a guide to timings:
Soft boiled |
5 minutes |
Medium boiled |
7 minutes |
Hard boiled |
10 minutes |
If you prefer to boil your eggs hard (ie a rolling boil rather than a simmer), this is a better gauge of how long they will take to cook:
Soft boiled |
3 minutes |
Medium boiled |
41/2 minutes |
Hard boiled |
10 minutes |
Whichever method you use, hard boiled eggs should be put straight into cold water after cooking or the heat inside them will continue the cooking process. That’s when you get that nasty greenish coating to the yolk.
Rule of thumb
You can’t cook scrambled eggs too slowly, or an omlette too quickly.
Duck eggs have a richer, more gamey flavour than hens’ eggs. The yolk is yellower and the white more rubbery when it’s fried. They are larger than hens’ eggs.
• Soft boil in 6–8 minutes
• Hard boil in 15 minutes
Goose eggs are much more flavoursome and richer than hens’ eggs. They make very good scrambled eggs and omlettes.
• Soft boil in 10 minutes
• Hard boil in 18 minutes
These taste a little more gamey than hens’ eggs and are much smaller (the Japanese quail’s egg is smaller than the Italian quail’s). They are most often served boiled, frequently as a starter, for example with crème fraîche and caviar, or in salads.
• Soft boil in 2–3 minutes
• Hard boil in 5 minutes