Hard boiled or hard cooked?

Some of you may be reading recipes and come across the need for hard cooked eggs instead of hard boiled.  Is there a difference? Well, that depends on who you talk to.  The American Egg Board has no definition for hard-boiled eggs; they consider the proper way to make eggs the hard-cooked method.  However, other Internet blogs (Eat4Fun, à la carte kitchen, et. al.) give some specific differences.

There is a difference in preparation.  Hard-boiled eggs get placed into boiling water; hard-cooked eggs get covered with cold water, heated to just boiling, and then removed from the stove to simmer in the heated water.

There is also said to be a difference in texture of the final products, but this is mostly noticeable by hard-core foodies.  Hard-cooked eggs are said to be less rubbery than hard-boiled.  The home cook will hardly ever notice a difference, which is why the two terms are pretty much interchangeable in recipes.  My preference is actually to have something a little stiffer to withstand the use of an egg slicer.

This series of posts uses the hard-boiled method.  My mother taught me this method, and it worked well for all those years at the renaissance fair.  Nobody complained about the eggs being cooked incorrectly or hard to peel.  So, on to the actual technique.

As always, I welcome your comments.  Click on the Comment link below; it may say "No" or have a number in front of it.