This Is the Best Way to Cook Hard-Boiled Eggs, According to Julia Child

Getty Images / NBC / Alfadanz Getty Images / NBC / Alfadanz

Julia Child changed the course of American culinary history with her generous and down-to-earth personality, her groundbreaking cooking show and her relatable hot takes about certain ingredients. (Do serve Goldfish as an appetizer at Thanksgiving; don’t use any other mayonnaise besides Hellman’s, she believed.)

Child also mentored or inspired some of the most iconic food personalities of today, including José Andrés, Carla Hall, Marcus Samuelsson, Martha Stewart and Sara Moulton. The latter food celeb was the guest on a recent podcast episode that allowed us to learn more about Child’s impact on her life.

On episode 44 of the Homemade Podcast from our sister magazine Allrecipes, TV host and cookbook author Sara Moulton dished about her impressive, decades-long career. From how she mastered home cooking (at the hip of her cookbook loving-mom) to her favorite fellow food TV hosts (Ina Garten, Jacques and Julia, Rick Bayless), Moulton offered an excellent overview of her own life-along with cooking tips and tricks that she’s picked up and shared with viewers, readers and loved ones.

One of those tricks comes straight from (you guessed it!) Child, who tapped Moulton to help her food style for upcoming projects. At the time she was initially hired with Child, 1978, Moulton was a chef manager of a catering company in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

“I hated catering, but it was a stepping stone to a restaurant job and we were peeling a million hard-boiled eggs. We started talking about Julia because Julia didn’t boil her eggs. She had this whole method, which is much better than boiling eggs to get hard-cooked eggs,” Moulton explains on the podcast. “And [one of my employees] said, ‘oh, you know, I’m a volunteer on her show.’ I was like, really? And so I said, ‘do you think Julia could take another volunteer?’ And she said, ‘well, yeah. Let me ask her.’ She came in the next day and said, ‘I told Julia all about you and she wants to hire you.'”

Coincidentally, Moulton soon picked up a brilliant way to make better hard-boiled eggs, straight from the spirited French fare-loving chef herself.

“The real nugget was she put the eggs in cold water, bring them up to a boil, take them off the heat and cover them and give them, say, 14 minutes without the boiling. And then immediately drain them and put them in the ice water,” Moulton tells Homemade host Martie Duncan. “If you don’t boil them, the whites are much more tender. And if you get them right into ice water, you cool them down very fast. You don’t get that green line between the yolk and the white.”

Hard-boiled eggs without boiling? Yes, it’s possible, and yes, it’s brilliant, EatingWell Senior Digital Food Editor Megan O. Steintrager agrees.

“This method is my go-to for hard-boiling eggs. It produces perfectly cooked eggs that are easy to peel. I also like that the eggs don’t knock around in the pan so there’s no risk of them splitting open. This method also prevents overcooking, so there’s no green line around the yolk,” Steintrager says. “It’s no surprise that Julia Child’s method works so well-she’s a legend for a reason!”

Want to give this strategy a shot? Simply grab a few eggs, a saucepan (like All-Clad 2 ½-Quart Hard Anodized Nonstick Sauce Pan; buy it: $54.95, Amazon) and we’ll talk you through how to make hard-boiled eggs the Julia Child way. Then put those eggs to delicious use in these low-carb Hard-Boiled Egg BLTs or this super-summery Deviled-Egg Macaroni Salad.

Tags: Child, cook, Eggs, HardBoiled, Julia