Why You Should Try Cooking Eggs In A Muffin Pan
When you're making breakfast for a crowd (or just for yourself), the last thing you want to do is spend time waiting by the stove. And while eggs may be one of the easiest dishes to cook in large quantities, they're also a little finicky. How well-done your egg is cooked often comes down to a minute marker — three minutes yields a soft-boiled egg, while five minutes gives you a medium-cooked yolk, and six minutes makes a hard boil (via Egg Info). If something pulls your attention away for even thirty seconds, you may end up with an egg more hard-boiled than you'd like. Luckily, there are an endless amount of time-saving, egg-cooking hacks nowadays.
According to Buzzfeed, hard-boiled eggs will peel quickly if you shake them up in a glass with water. And instead of lobbing your yolks back and forth in the shells to pull them away from the whites, you can use a water bottle to separate eggs quickly. If you're hosting a brunch or feeding your entire family, you should try making eggs on a sheet pan – just pop the pan in the oven and return a few minutes later to a perfectly baked breakfast.
But if you prefer your eggs soft or hard-boiled, there's another oven hack that will yield delicious, hands-off results.
The hands-free method that feeds a crowd
If you own a muffin tin, you have all you need to make perfectly cooked eggs. What is perfectly cooked, you ask? That's up to you. After all, one of the perks of this method is that you can still make your eggs to your ideal level of doneness. According to Savor and Savvy, muffin tin-baked eggs are customizable in other ways, too. You can add different seasonings to each egg, and scramble the eggs with your choice of mix-ins, although this will increase baking time.
If you're hard-boiling your eggs, the process couldn't be easier. After spraying the muffin pan with oil and cracking an egg in each cup, Real Simple recommends baking them at 325 degrees Fahrenheit for half an hour. To make sure they don't continue cooking out of the oven, immediately place them in an ice bath. And if you enjoy making poached eggs, it's actually one of the absolute best uses for your muffin tin. Just add water over each egg and bake at 350 degrees Fahrenheit for nine to 15 minutes.
In addition to being easy and time-saving, Savor and Savvy notes that this method is budget-friendly and healthier than frying, as you use less oil. And if you're not sure what to do with these muffin tin eggs, just eat them as you would any other boiled egg — in a sandwich or egg salad, on avocado toast, or however your heart desires.