Another peculiarity of platine bleue eggs

Curiouser and curiouser! The more I work with different types of eggs, the more I feel like Alice falling through a rabbit's hole. That's my lunch in the picture -- hard boiled eggs with an herb salad. The eggs are platine bleue eggs by Azuluna brand from Whole Foods. They come from Ameraucana hens and have light blue shells. That's the ones I can never manage to poach because the white is always too runny no matter how fresh they are. I used to think I kept getting unlucky, but Dan, a student of mine who raises different types of chickens confirmed my suspicion -- platine bleue eggs just don't poach. What do they do well? Everything else -- scramble, boil (I don't know why it's called boil, it's really a very gentle poach), sunny-side up, omelettes. The fact that these eggs are fabulous boiled with their huge golden yolks wasn't a surprise. What was a surprise was that they peeled like a dream even though they were fresh (just bought them that day). The common wisdom is "thou shall never boil a fresh egg" because they are difficult to peel. Well, I've never seen eggs slip out of the shell as easily as these did.

If you haven't tried these blue beauties yet, they are worth every penny for "hard boiled" applications.

How to "boil" an egg

For 1-5 large eggs

Bring 2.5 inches of water to a boil in a 2 quart pot. The exact amount of water is not important, but you want the eggs to be relatively cozy in the pot, but completely covered with water. Bring the water to a boil, then turn the heat down so that it barely simmers. Carefully lower the eggs one at a time into the pot using a spoon. Turn up the heat until you get a gentle simmer back (by simmer I mean slight motion in the water and an occasional tiny bubble, not continuous bubbling). The eggs should never rattle. If you hear them banging on the pot, turn down the heat. On electric stove, you might need to move the pot off the heat temporarily to drop the temperature quickly enough. Cook for 10 minutes (if cooking large eggs). Pour out the hot water and fill the pot with cold water to stop the cooking. Let sit until cool, about 10 minutes. Gently bang each egg all over on a hard surface to crack the shell and return back to the water while banging the other eggs. Peel in the water.