See how long to boil eggs, pasta and common vegetables, from soft-boiled to fully cooked. Tap any entry to start a matching timer so nothing overcooks.
Boiling time depends on the ingredient's size, starting temperature, and how much water it's in. The times shown are typical values for boiling water.
This single fact explains everything about boiled eggs. Whites begin setting around 62–65°C, yolks around 68–70°C.
That gap is what makes a soft-boiled egg possible — stop between the two and the white is firm while the yolk still runs.
A 63°C sous-vide egg inverts the same principle: held at that temperature the yolk turns custard-like while the white stays barely set.
At 6 minutes the white has just set and the yolk is fully liquid. This is the ramen egg.
7 minutes is the most popular soft-boil: firm white, yolk set at the edge and still running in the centre.
At 9 minutes the yolk is set but creamy, still moist in the middle. Good on salads and toast.
12 minutes gives you a hard-boiled egg, yolk fully set and crumbly.
Past 15 minutes it is overcooked, and a grey-green ring appears around the yolk.
It is iron sulphide, formed when sulphur from the white reacts with iron in the yolk under heat.
Harmless to eat, but it carries a faint sulphurous smell and looks unappealing.
Prevent it by not overcooking and dropping the eggs into cold water immediately — residual heat keeps cooking them otherwise.
Fridge-cold eggs need one to two minutes longer than room-temperature ones.
The timings assume large eggs. Add a minute for jumbo, subtract one for small.
A big batch drops the water temperature. Start timing from when it returns to a boil.
At altitude water boils below 100°C, roughly 3°C lower per 1,000m, so cooking takes longer. Irrelevant at sea level, very noticeable in the mountains.
Fresh eggs peel worst. Their lower pH makes the white cling to the shell membrane. Eggs a week or more old peel far more easily.
Start in boiling water rather than bringing them up from cold — the thermal shock helps separate the membrane.
Into ice water immediately afterwards. Contraction opens a gap between shell and white.
Peel under running water, which gets in beneath the shell and helps.
Adding salt or vinegar is commonly recommended but tests show little effect.
Steaming peels much more easily — 6 to 12 minutes in a steamer, similar timings and no risk of the pot boiling over.
Air fryer — around 120–130°C for about 15 minutes. No water needed and easy to batch, though machines vary enough that you should test with one egg first.
Microwave — an egg in its shell will explode, because the steam has nowhere to escape. Use a purpose-made container, or peel and pierce it first.
Hard-boiled eggs keep about a week refrigerated in their shells, dropping to two or three days once peeled.
Do not leave them at room temperature beyond two hours. Boiled eggs actually spoil faster than raw ones — boiling washes away the shell's protective cuticle.
Test freshness in water: a fresh egg lies flat on the bottom, an older one tilts up, and one that floats should be discarded. The air cell grows as moisture escapes through the shell.
Roughly 6–7 minutes for a soft, runny yolk, 9–10 minutes for a jammy centre and 12–13 minutes for a firm hard-boiled egg, starting from boiling water.
Yes. Tap any item and a countdown timer opens with the right time already set.
Cold eggs need about 30 seconds to a minute longer. Letting them sit at room temperature briefly before boiling also helps the shell crack less.
What this tool bases its numbers on, and how far those numbers go.
Each row holds a published typical time for that ingredient and doneness in boiling water. Tapping a row starts a countdown set to exactly that value — nothing is recomputed from your inputs, because the tool has no way to know them.Tapping the soft-boiled egg row at 6:30 starts a timer at 6 minutes 30 seconds. The chart value is the timer value.