Boiled, steamed, baked, instant pot, sous vide, cold-start. The clear winner is duller than you’d think.

You google “how to boil an egg” and get fifty articles, all contradicting each other. We bought four dozen eggs and tested every method that came up. This is what actually works.

The methods we tested

Cold start: eggs in cold water, bring to boil, simmer 9 minutes. Method most home cooks use.

Hot start (boiled): water already boiling, lower eggs in, cook 11 minutes. Restaurant standard.

Steamed: water boiling under a steamer basket, eggs on top, cover, 12 minutes.

Oven baked: eggs in a muffin tin at 165°C fan for 30 minutes.

Pressure cooker (Instant Pot): 1 cup water, trivet, 5 minutes high pressure, 5 minute natural release.

Sous vide: water bath at 75°C for 13 minutes.

What we measured

Peelability (could you peel the egg cleanly without losing white). Yolk colour (bright yellow good, grey ring bad). Yolk texture (firm but creamy good, chalky bad). Active cook time (how long you have to actually do something). Difficulty.

The winner

Steamed for 12 minutes, then plunged into ice water. It was not even close.

Eight out of eight steamed eggs peeled in one piece. Yolks were uniformly bright yellow, no grey ring at all, firm but not chalky. The eggs took 12 minutes to cook, exactly, plus a few minutes for the steamer to come up. You can read a book.

The reason it works is simple. Steam transfers heat slightly more gently than boiling water, so the white doesn’t slam-cook against the shell membrane. That’s what makes it peel cleanly. The 12-minute mark is hot enough to fully set the yolk but stops just before the iron-sulphur reaction that turns the centre grey.

The runner-up

Hot start in boiling water for 11 minutes. Almost as good as steamed but with two out of eight eggs that lost a chunk of white when peeling. Yolks were perfect. If you don’t own a steamer basket, this is your method.

What lost

Cold start. Three eggs cracked in the pot. Two had grey yolks. Peelability was poor on five out of eight. Skip this method, despite it being the most-googled.

Pressure cooker. Yes, it peels well. But the yolks were chalky and the tip-to-tip range across eight eggs was wider than any other method. You also can’t see the eggs. Inconsistent.

Oven baked. Convenient for a big batch, but the yolks went grey and the whites had brown spots where they touched the muffin tin. Don’t do this.

Sous vide. Beautiful for soft-yolk eggs at 63°C. Pointless for hard-boiled. The white was mealy and slightly off-texture. Use sous vide for jammy, not hard-boiled.

The full method

Bring 3cm of water to the boil in a wide saucepan with a steamer basket on top. When the water is boiling hard and the basket is steaming, lower in cold eggs straight from the fridge. Cover. Set a timer for 12 minutes. When the timer rings, transfer the eggs immediately to a bowl of iced water and leave for 5 minutes.

Crack on the wider end (where the air pocket is), peel under cold running water. Done.

What if I want jammy not hard?

Same method, 7 minutes for jammy yolk, 9 minutes for set-but-soft. Anything from 6 to 13 works depending on what you are after. 12 is the sweet spot for fully hard.

Use them in eggs benedict (with a hot stream of hollandaise to soften the yolk further), nicoise salad, or a proper devilled egg platter.