Hard Boiled Egg in 4 Minutes Using Microwave

This method of cooking egg using microwave is useful if you want to "boil" ONLY ONE egg because you are preparing it only for yourself. Photo above does not depict egg yolk as good as it was, because I used the blunt spoon to cut the egg in half, instead of using a knife. But seeing the color, you will know that it was "hard boiled" to perfection.

I have been boiling eggs by batches of 6-10 in the past, for using in ramen/noodle soup or arroz caldo, but oftentimes, my kids would forget about them. So there will be several of them eggs in the fridge, even after a week. I am not comfortable with that, especially if the egg has cracked during boiling. After a while I just toss them away; what a waste! Though I have seen and eaten hard boiled eggs sitting on the counter of some carinderia in the Philippines and I had no idea how long they had been sitting there from the time they were cooked, I am not comfortable having any cooked foods sitting on the countertop at room temp for more than 4 hours, or in the fridge for more than two weeks. That's why, boiling several eggs (to maximize use of water, time, and electricity) does not really appeal to me.

So I experimented again with the microwave. When I was a kid, I always had some protein in my ramen (mami) noodles, and some veggies when we had them in the fridge. I used to boil the egg in the water as I cooked the noodles. My kids are too lazy to do the same, so they cook their noodles in the microwave. But in an attempt to influence them to add at least a hard boiled egg in their noodle soup, I had to improvise to make hard boiled eggs without deviating from their method of cooking noodles. And I found that method...saves me time and electricity, and avoids tossing away leftovers.


Ingredients:
1 egg
HOT water/soup/arroz caldo to cover at least 3/4 of the egg upright (maybe a cup of hot water will do)

Instructions:

If using water, turn your faucet to HOT until you get it really hot. I was using hot homemade chicken stock at the time, to turn into chicken mami, so the other ingredients here supported the egg upright. Having the egg upright while uncooked helps it from leaking out the white into the water/soup. If using cold water, you might have to prolong the microwave time. Feel free to experiment and get to know your microwave better.

Tap gently the wider end of the egg and peel off some shell to create a small hole. This hole will allow for some expansion of air or eggwhite while the egg gets hot during microwaving (as you can see by the knob that formed in the photo). If you do not create a hole, there will be no outlet for expansion and the egg will EXPLODE inside the microwave (I know...I have done that!). Place this egg upright in the bowl or cup, with soup/water reaching up to 3/4 of the egg.

Cover and microwave for 4 minutes (this is for a 1.6 kW microwave). You might want to adjust accordingly depending on your microwave. I also had tried doing this with cool soup and it gave me malasadong itlog, which I also like.

I demonstrated this to my kids...they thought it was cool!

Are you ready to try it?

UPDATE: I tried doing this with only some water and using a cup to hold the egg upright. It exploded. I did it twice. Both exploded. So I think, to achieve a really hard-boiled egg consistency, you must include other foods so the microwave does not concentrate the energy only on the egg. Maybe a lower power will also work (which I have tried at 30% and it still exploded. I dared not experiment again after that).