Elyse Kopecky Shares Her Foolproof Hack for Boiled Eggs

The Instant Pot is a meal prep workhouse in more ways than one, cutting down cook time on everything from proteins to sauces. Elyse gives us a quick rundown of the Instant Pot and shows us how she uses the multicooker to prep perfectly boiled eggs (in less than 1o minutes!) every time.

Part of the Mastering Meal Prep with Elyse Kopecky video series. 

Read transcript, below:

ELYSE KOPECKY: Having the right tools in the kitchen will save you time with your meal prep routine. One of my favorite tools that I use to save time in the kitchen when I’m meal prepping is my Instant Pot. I love having this available because it does so many different functionalities. It’s a slow cooker, a pressure cooker, you can sauté with it, you can hard-boiled eggs, you can cook grains and beans really fast.

This is my go-to for my meal prep routine. I’m going to show you a couple tips and tricks. It can be a bit overwhelming when you first get one. The newer models, they seal automatically, but the older ones, you want to make sure that the valve at the top is set to seal. When you’re pressure cooking, you want it sealed. When you’re slow cooking, you want it vented. Make sure you adjust your valve according to what type of cooking you’re doing. Pressure cooking uses a lot of high heat so it has to be really a tight seal. That’s what cooks helps cook grains and beans and meat so quickly.

I also use my Instant Pot to hard boil eggs. I keep hard-boiled eggs on hand for quick snacks. It’s a good high-protein, healthy fat snack to keep it stashed in your fridge, or you can use hard-boiled eggs to add on top of your grain salads to add some extra protein.

You want to have like a little trivet like this. This helps fill the eggs above the water. You don’t want your eggs to be fully submerged in the water. You’re going to set your eggs just inside that little trivet. You’re going to add a couple inches of water to the bottom of your pot, but you don’t want to submerge the eggs. So just enough, like about a cup of water, is just enough. Then you want to seal, this is going to be high heat pressure cooking. So you want to seal your pot and make sure your valve is set to the seal position.

These are going to cook really fast. They only need about three or four minutes of pressure cook time. We’re just going to go pressure cook into the custom setting and dial it down to just depending on the size of your eggs, three or four minutes, and you hit start and then you are hard boiling your eggs.