Whether you add them to a salad, turn them into deviled eggs, or eat them plain, hard-boiled eggs are one of the best snacks to keep on hand. While the norm may be to let these pockets of protein cool down before digging in, a hard-boiled egg that’s still hot from the water and sprinkled with a bit of salt and pepper is life changing. The warmth makes the yolk more gooey and the entire snack slightly more decadent. If you don’t want to eat them plain, they’re still handy for making a quick casserole, breakfast hash, or breakfast burrito upgraded with gochujang.
However, if you need to reheat the eggs to get them to the right temperature, it’s imperative that you don’t put them in the microwave. When hard-boiled eggs are reheated in a microwave, they have a tendency to explode because eggs contain a lot of moisture. As the interior moisture heats up, it becomes steam and builds up a lot of pressure inside the shell. After enough time, the pressure becomes too much, causing the egg to burst and land yolk all over your microwave.
How to reheat whole hard-boiled eggs
Even if you peeled the egg before popping it in the microwave, the moisture within the egg would still expand and cause the white to break apart. To avoid that, you would have to microwave the egg in short increments of time, which is extremely inconvenient. Instead of redecorating the interior of your microwave with egg whites, reach for a pot or bowl the next time you want to reheat hard-boiled eggs: Fill the bowl with as many eggs as you want to heat up and enough boiling water to completely cover them. Cover the container to trap the steam; after about ten minutes, the eggs should be at the perfect temperature and ready to eat.
If you’d rather avoid the process of reheating eggs, you could always just hard-boil an egg or two at a time so there are no leftovers. This may seem like it would waste water, but that’s less of a problem if you steam your hard-boiled eggs. When you’re finally ready to peel and eat, use Gordon Ramsay’s tip to make peeling hard-boiled eggs hassle-free.