How to peel boiled quail eggs without breaking I can peel chicken eggs fine, but boiled quail eggs are much smaller &amp; easier to break. I tend to use my finger nails to help with peeling but it's easy to cut it too much due to the thin egg whites. Sometimes, even just pulling a half-off shell piece is enough to break the egg in half.
I've tried thermal-shocking the shell with cool water right after boiling &amp; lightly cracking the shell before peeling, but the shells tend to come off as small pieces rather than whole big ones, making each egg take &gt;10 seconds to peel, which adds up really quickly. Even peeling them underwater doesn't seem to help much, as it doesn't separate the shell from the white.
What's a good way to more quickly peel such small &amp; delicate quail eggs without breaking?
Start with eggs near their sell-by date, not ones you only just bought. The shell gets less attached to the egg with age &amp; air builds a gap.
Boil as desired [hard-boiled is easier, of course].
Use the pan lid to drain off the water, then hold it tight &amp; shake the pan to smash the shells into smaller [still mainly attached] pieces. Hard enough to break the shells, not hard enough to mince the contents.
Fill the pan with cold water. This will rapidly cool the eggs &amp; as the water seeps in between, will aid separation of egg from shell.
Once cold, pull one at a time, roll gently on a hard surface - your aim is lots of tiny pieces, no large areas remaining - &amp; pick an easy start-point. The shells should come off in one go.
I found backup to this, from a quail egg supplier…
How to easily peel quail eggs