Harold McGee is the author of this article and he is both brilliant and a great writer. Reading the rest of his articles on that site [0] would be time well spent. This paragraph alone was enough to get me to whip up a batch of salt-rising bread [1], and it was indeed tasty. I have made it several times since.
"The engine behind this fermentation method is Clostridium perfringens, a close relative of bacteria that cause botulism, tetanus, and food poisoning. It can eat flesh. It gives gas gangrene its name by causing putrefying flesh wounds that bubble and foam with flammable hydrogen. And it can make something surprisingly delicate and tasty."
I used to make ginger beer, which is traditionally is cultured from a thing called a ginger beer plant; this is a jamjar full of nasty brown goop consisting of a symbiotic mix of yeast and bacteria (and a lot of slowly decomposing ginger).
What you're supposed to do is to leave a jamjar of sugary water out in the open for a few days so that it gets infected with whatever strain of wild yeast happen to be floating around your house. You keep feeding it for a month or so and the desired types of bacteria and yeast are supposed to outcompete the others and you end up with the right stuff to make ginger beer out of.
Good ginger beer plants make good beer, and afficionados have been using the same plant for years, occasionally swapping cultures with other people to breed just the right culture to make really good beer.
Me, I was squeamish about wild yeast in my 1900 British terrace mostly made out of damp rotting bricks, so I added a tiny amount of beer yeast to mine to get it started. Worked really well.
I eventually lost the plant when I had to go on holiday, and so was unable to feed it. Instead I tried freezing it. The results when I thawed it were very weird --- I think the freezing process killed of all the yeast, but not the bacteria, or vice versa. It was certainly quite useless.
This is a lovely article, but I can't help feel the author is missing a trick. If you need to peel an egg, do it under fast running cold water. No matter the condition of the egg, the running water will rapidly separate the shell and membrane from what's underneath, and it usually comes away in a single sheet. No need for 4-8 hours of chemistry.
I have to agree, and I say this as someone who used to pluck eggs from under the chicken, and boil them later that day. Running water is magical stuff.
It might be that you don't have the problem with peeling very fresh eggs the author is addressing. We keep our own hens, and an egg just a few days old is bloomin hard to shift the shell off.
Having spent the better part of a week researching this one, I found two things that "cracked the case": 1) steam cook instead of boil (12 minutes in a pot with 1/4" water) - and then 2) let them cool down for 12+ hours. You can at that point crack the shell in half and the hard-cooked egg will fall out...
If waiting isn't an option, then under water -- either running water or in a bowl -- works just as well. The outer membrane that sticks to the shell just needs moisture to release.
We get fresh eggs twice a week from our neighbour who keeps hens. Unless he is secretly giving us old eggs (not impossible, he's pretty grumpy) I think we generally should have very freshly laid ones. Have you tried the running water trick?
Yeah everyone has their own way of peeling eggs, handed down by parents/grandparents? Mine is to shake the saucepan quite hard just after the eggs are boiled (how hard depends on how long you boiled the egg). This should put a few clear cracks in the shell. Now submerge in ice water or just run cold water over the eggs for a minute. Now when you go to peel it, the shell has separated and it should just come right now cleanly. Works for me about 95% of the time (could be more but I'm often lazy)
Here's my method explained in detail by someone else, followed by comments of more methods.. it's a rabbit hole.
Roll it on a hard surface? Shell cracks into small fragments that stick to the membrane between shell and egg, and it peels right off. I haven't ever had the problems described.
I've tried every non-chemical method that I could find, and The Spoon Method is the most foolproof method to peel eggs, soft boiled or hard, cold or warm, old or new. All it takes is about five practice eggs and you should have it down. It's insanely easy, quick, and effective: you get a spoon, crack the egg, and work the spoon up under the shell by pointing the end of the spoon at the shell, so it pushes up and cracks the shell, and only the bottom curved part of the spoon comes in contact with the white, briefly. You can take the entire shell off in one go. There is no cooked egg that it hasn't worked on for me. YMMV
Another solution [1] was on HN a while ago. Lower the cold eggs into boiling water, boil for 7-9 minutes for desired yolk, then plunge into ice water. We regularly boil 2-4 dozen eggs a week this way and almost never get a stubborn peeler, whether the eggs are old or fresh, store-bought or backyard.
Thanks for posting this, I love Harold McGee and wasn't aware of his posts here. I've now got a bunch of browser tabs open with his other articles, can't wait to read them all...
He used to write occasionally for the NY Times, but it's been awhile. He's also an occasional guest on Dave Arnold's podcast "Cooking Issues."
"The engine behind this fermentation method is Clostridium perfringens, a close relative of bacteria that cause botulism, tetanus, and food poisoning. It can eat flesh. It gives gas gangrene its name by causing putrefying flesh wounds that bubble and foam with flammable hydrogen. And it can make something surprisingly delicate and tasty."
[0] http://luckypeach.com/author/haroldmcgee/
[1] http://luckypeach.com/infectious-confection/
* edited for formatting