Prepare Korean Sauna Eggs in an Instant Pot
I am always amazed at how many different ways there are to cook and eat eggs. Within the mixed food genre alone , I have three favorites ( super slow, whipped with a hand blender and mixed with cheese ). Lately, I’ve really gotten into hard fighting. I love slicing them up (obviously) and wrapping them in miso , but now I’m totally obsessed with these toasted, nutty, so tender seven o’clock eggs. (Spoiler alert: They don’t really take seven hours.)
You may have seen these dark brown, hard-boiled eggs called “Korean bath eggs” or perhaps “huevos haminados” if you are familiar with Sephardic cooking, but they are essentially eggs that were cooked a long time ago. According to Harold McGee’s Food and Cooking , this is a lengthy cooking process in which “a quarter of a gram of glucose in white sugar reacts with protein to create flavor and pigments typical of fried foods.” This means your egg tastes fried , which is, honestly, wild. The white is also insanely tender, while the yolk is creamy and almost fluffy in texture.
I guess very few people want to boil eggs for seven hours, but given that we live in an era of instant cooking, you can make these fried, fatty egg treats in less than two. (McGee made it in just an hour , but he used a pressure cooker operating at 15 psi, whereas the Instant Pot has 11 to 12 psi.) To make them you will need:
- Eggs – as many as fit on a single layer at the bottom of the Instant Pot.
- Water – enough to cover the eggs
- 2 teaspoons kosher salt
Allow the eggs to warm to room temperature for about an hour – this will help prevent cracking during cooking – then place them in the insert for quick cooking. Fill them with water, add salt and close the pot, making sure the drain valve is set to the “seal” position. Press Manual or Pressure Cooking, make sure you are set to High Pressure and set the time to 90 minutes. After the cooking time has elapsed, release the pressure by hand, (carefully) remove the hot eggs from the insert – use tongs or a spider – and place them in an ice bath until they are completely cool to the touch. Peel them off, eat them maybe, damn them. (I see an egg, I am a fucking egg. This is who I am.)