I tried the egg peeling hack that's going viral on Twitter—does it really work?

My last boyfriend used to eat hard-boiled eggs every day. And like the good, doting girlfriend I was, I would cook two dozen for him at the start of every week. The actual cooking part was easy (toss them in a pot of boiling water and wait) but it was the peeling part that got to me. I'd start off strong. Okay, maybe this first egg was a fluke, they won't all be so tough to peel.

At four eggs in, I typically started to question why I had ever agreed to this hell, peeling off minuscule pieces of shell while trying to avoid removing the actual egg white, all the while burning my fingertips. By the time I got to the 24th egg (if I even got there at all), I was in a black cloud of rage, surrounded by mountains of broken shells and misshapen, poorly peeled eggs.

Basically, it was the bane of my Sunday afternoons.

And while "hard-boiled egg peeler" is no longer in my job description, I still like to eat the occasional egg—so when I saw the hack that's been all over the Internet this week, I was very intrigued. Could it really be that easy? Skeptical (but hopeful), I decided to try it out for myself.

How to easily peel hard-boiled eggs

According to the video, which was originally posted to Twitter, all you have to do is take your cooked egg, place it in a glass of water, then shake it up for a few seconds. At that point, you take the egg out of the water and simply pop it out of its shell—no painstaking peeling involved. (Seriously, the guy just squeezed the egg the same way you'd squeeze an edamame pod to press the bean out.)

What happened when I tried it at home

First, I cooked my lone egg (no one has time to waste a perfectly good dozen eggs on one bizarre trick, after all). Then I filled a glass cup up with cold water from the tap and dropped my egg—which was still piping hot—inside. Placing my hand over the cup, I then shook it vigorously back and forth for 15 seconds, refilling the water as necessary. PSA: This will be messy and you will end up with water everywhere if you're like me.

I then removed the egg from the cup. At this point there were tiny cracks all over the shell. I lightly tried to squeeze the egg at the bottom to pop it out of the shell, just like the man had done in the video. It took a little more pressure than I expected—and some of the base of the egg peeled off with the shell in my fingers—but eventually the egg dropped out of the shell, landing with a satisfying plop in the bottom of the cup.

Does the hard-boiled egg peeling hack work?

Yes—but not perfectly. Squeezing it out of the shell removed some of the bottom part of the egg white so my egg still ended up with some chunks taken out of it. However, that may not have been an issue if I had used colder water or let my egg rest for longer. All in all, it was still a heck of a lot easier than peeling the shell off piece by tiny piece.

And while peeling hard-boiled eggs may always be somewhat of a chore, cooking them certainly doesn't have to be. It's easy enough to toss them in a pot of boiling water, of course, but our experts also recommend the wildly popular Dash Rapid Egg Cooker. It has a cult following on Amazon (and over 17,000 glowing reviews!) because it makes perfect hard-boiled eggs in just minutes and is super easy to use on busy weekday mornings.