In Fact, You Don’t Need to “shock” Hard Boiled Eggs in Ice Water.
Common kitchen wisdom says that hard-boiled eggs need to be “shocked” in an ice bath to stop the cooking process and make them easier to clean, but only half of that is true and the other half can be easily softened, which means you can leave the ice in the freezer. …
Submerging hot eggs in a bowl of ice water has absolutely no effect on their cleanability. I know this because I recently cooked and ate a huge amount of hard-boiled eggs, and not a single ice cube was used to clean them. The only water temperature that affects eggs and how easy it is to peel them is their starting temperature, which should be boiling; Launching eggs in cold water and bringing them to a boil will bind the eggs to the shell, making them very difficult to separate from the shell. Run boiled eggs in hot water and you won’t have this problem. (The only exception is pressure cooked eggs , which are also very easy to peel.)
Place the boiled eggs in a bowl of plain cold water, especially if you’re only cooking a few – that’s all you need to keep them cool enough to handle. Once they are no longer hot, you can clean them as usual without damaging the whiteness.
So the ice water will not affect the cleanability of the egg, but it is true that it will stop the cooking process. Fortunately, the eggs are not as tender as something like asparagus (a vegetable that shocks really well ), and you can prevent the eggs from digesting due to the heat transferred by simply cooking them for a shorter time .
All three eggs above were cooked in my Instant Pot for five minutes under high pressure, followed by manual release. The one on the left was rinsed under cold water until it cooled down enough to peel the skin immediately after cooking time, and the two on the right were transferred to a bowl of cold tap water along with four more eggs. As you can see, the yolks on the right are a little harder and a little paler, but without the dreadful gray gray ring. If this tiny bit of further cooking is unacceptable to you, you can always shorten the cooking time by a minute and use the residual heat to “finish” the eggs.
If you’re happy with your ice water bath, keep doing it by all means. But don’t expect it to make peeling the eggs easier, and don’t panic if you boil a few eggs one day and find yourself out of ice. You can still make perfectly cooked peeled eggs, even without the frozen water cubes.