Can You Peel An Egg With Tape?

There are many meditative motions to cooking, like slicing, stirring, standing over a grill flipping patties with a beer in hand. But certain cooking tasks are just tedious and borderline infuriating, like peeling garlic, pitting olives, and cutting kernels off of corn cobs.

Among this list of undesirable cooking tasks is peeling hard and soft-boiled eggs, which can take upwards of three minutes per egg to peel off the tiny fragments of shell one by one, sometimes losing chunks of the egg white in the process.

There are many tips and tricks to peeling an egg on the internet — the common crack and roll method, the peel under water, and more (per The Kitchn). The cooking hacks that go viral do so because they effortlessly solve a universal issue that many can relate to. A viral TikTok, for example, with a whopping 32.7 million views and 5 million likes that shows a method of putting the cooked egg in a plastic container with water and shaking it for about 10 seconds until the shell comes off in nearly one piece.

But there is a lesser heard of hack to peeling eggs that solves this pesky task — enters the tape egg peeling method (via The Kitchn).

The unconventional egg-peeling hack works by wrapping tape around the equator of the boiled egg — one Youtube user uses packing tape. Next, tap and roll the egg gently to crack the shell, then peel the tape back. The tape should stick to all the little shell fragments and remove them from the egg. In the video, there were little caps left at each end that were easily pulled away by hand.

But how does this trick rank among other more well-known hacks? In this Kitchn article, writer Rachel Reiss tested out this method but concluded that although she found some success, it was inconsistent. Reiss also said she likely wouldn't use the trick again because aside from being a bit complex, she didn't understand the use of the tape when she could gain the same results without it. 

If you've tried other egg-peeling techniques but haven't found success, give this one a try. There's always room for another time-saving cooking hack.