How to Steam Eggs Like a Pro

About five years ago, I learned how to steam eggs. They are such a great food to batch cook and meal prep for easy healthy lunches or snacks too. Now, steaming eggs is my favourite way to eat them!

I love making a big batch of perfect hard- or soft-cooked eggs to use as an easy and ready source of protein for quick meals on busy days.

Nutritional Benefits of Eggs

For me, eggs are in many ways an ideal and quintessentially perfect source of protein.

Eggs offer:

• High-quality protein (about 6 g protein in 1 chicken egg)
• Complete protein in that they contain all of the essential amino acids
• Easily digestible protein (with a biological value of 100, many nutritionists consider eggs the gold standard for protein absorption/digestion)
• Vitamin D (critical year-round but especially during the winter months for us Canadians when sun exposure is often limited)
• Brain food! They are one of the best non-meat, non-seafood sources of choline. Choline is a B vitamin that helps support memory. You can check out some of the nutritional benefits of choline here.

Why I Started Steaming Eggs Instead of Boiling Them

For years I always boiled my eggs. I’ve tried various techniques over the years. Some worked, some didn’t. Sometimes they peeled well, often they didn’t.

I’ve cooked eggs where the outside was well-cooked and the inside was still very raw. I’ve overcooked them more times than I can count. And I really dislike that unsightly but innocuous grey ring that appears around overcooked yolks. I’ve also cooked my fair share of eggs that ended up badly misshaped after I tried to peel them.

Now, the only way I hard cook eggs now is steaming them.

I wouldn’t call it a secret exactly, but I don’t think it’s a common technique yet.

I hope to change that by sharing it with you!

The steaming method results in perfectly cooked eggs, every single time.

This “how to steam eggs” technique also results in easy-to-peel eggs that can handle a bit of rough handling when you’re in a hurry. And it doesn’t matter if you peel them hot or cold, the eggs always look great!  

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Step-by-step Instructions for How to Steam Eggs:

1. Fill a large pot with several inches of water.

2. Place a steamer attachment or vegetable steamer basket into your pot. It should fit inside with limited gaps around the rim. The water also shouldn’t rise above the base of the steamer. In other words, make sure the eggs are not sitting in water.

3. Place your fresh eggs in the steamer attachment or basket. Cover. Increase the heat to high.

4. Cook those eggs using the power of steam until they’re done to your liking! For soft-cooked eggs, this is usually 10-12 minutes for me.

5. Add them to an ice bath, a bowl of ice filled with cold water. Let them hang out until they are cool enough to handle.

6. Peel and/or store and use as you like!

A few more tips for how to steam eggs:

• You may have to play around with the timing based on your preferred egg hardness, your equipment, the number of eggs being cooked at once, altitude, etc.
• Since cooking eggs reduces their nutritional content, I usually soft-cook them. So I can take advantage of as much nutrition as I can. Hard-cooked eggs usually take another 2-3 minutes of cook time.
• If storing them, you can peel your steamed eggs before or after they go in the fridge. It doesn’t seem to affect the peeling one way or the other. I like to keep the shells on until I’m ready to use them.
• I typically eat chicken eggs but you could easily adapt these instructions for quail eggs, duck eggs or goose eggs. Use 3-4 quail eggs for every 1 chicken egg in egg salads, etc.

Steamed Egg Recipe Ideas

Adding hard- or soft-cooked eggs to your meals is an easy way to pump up the protein in them. This is true whether it’s:

• in your lunchtime salad or as egg salad. You can do this with or without bread – think lettuce cups or collard wraps for an extra veggie boost;
• in a quickie breakfast with a big pile of leftover roasted vegetables; or
• as an afternoon snack with some sea salt and spice.

A quick lunch for me could be a big salad, lots of veggies, and a few soft-cooked eggs. This comes together in no time flat (especially if you batch cook!).

And while the steamed eggs cook, you can make a bang up dressing to give everything a supreme flavour boost.

They’re portable and easy to dress up in a multitude of ways.  

Share your favourite way to eat your hard- or soft-cooked eggs with me.

Life is a plate… Eat up!

Ashleigh