A quarter inch of water is enough

Mads’s dad has been making eggs this way since Mads was a kid, which means this house never learned the version where you fill a pot and stand there while it thinks about boiling. Breakfast was a quarter inch of water, a lid, and a timer, and that is still breakfast. After pickup the kids want eggs, and they are usually done before anyone has found the salt.

You put about a quarter inch of water in any size pot and bring it to a boil, which does not take long even on an old slow stove, then you lower in however many eggs you need. They do not even have to touch the water, because what cooks them is the steam under the lid. Close it, start the timer, and stay out of the pot.

Times start when the lid goes on: six minutes for soft-boiled with small eggs (or six and a half for large), nine minutes for almost hard with a soft center (or nine and a half for large), and ten minutes for hard-boiled (or ten and a half for large). That is the whole list, and the method does not change with the number of eggs.

The methods you usually hear about start with a pot of water. Cold-start fills it and asks you to wait for the whole thing to boil before the real cooking even begins. Dropping eggs into a rolling boil still makes you heat a full pot first, and then the water cools when the cold eggs go in, so the clock is a little different every time. A quarter inch is already steam, so whether you are making one egg or a pile of them, you are not waiting for water.

We never waited, because we always did it this way. Lid on, timer on, eggs off, same every time, the way it has been since Mads was little.