Eggs, Cooking by Temperature (Sous Vide, Induction, Steam)

Hold an egg at a chosen temperature and the yolk sets to that temperature and then stops changing. That is the whole trick behind a sous vide stick — and the reason an induction hob, a steamer and an electric egg cooker each need a completely different set of instructions, because only one of them actually lets you choose a temperature. Every band below describes the YOLK. The white runs on its own schedule, and that is where most plans come apart.

Directions

Three different things you can steer

There are only three variables in a cooked egg: how hot, how long, and where the heat comes from. Each method below nails down two of them and leaves you one to steer — and that is the real reason the same egg needs four different sets of instructions.
A sous vide stick, or an induction hob with a probe in the water: you steer TEMPERATURE. The yolk climbs to whatever you set and then stops. Time is long and very forgiving.
Boiling or steaming: the temperature is fixed at 212 °F / 100 °C and you steer TIME. Thirty seconds is a visible difference, and the jammy window is about a minute wide.
The Evoloop cooker: temperature and time are both out of your hands. You steer WATER VOLUME, which is a stopwatch in disguise — the buzzer fires when the heating plate boils dry, so more water simply means a longer run.

Read this before you use the bands

The five bands below describe the YOLK, and only the yolk. They are a good map of it.
The white is the problem. Its majority protein, ovalbumin — 54 percent of the white — does not firm up until about 176 °F / 80 °C, which is hotter than every band on this card. So at 135 through 160 °F the white is somewhere between liquid and a fragile custard, and no egg cooked in that range can be peeled. Plan around that, not against it.
A large fridge-cold egg needs 40 to 45 minutes just to REACH the temperature of the bath. That is why every band says 45 to 60 minutes — roughly forty of those minutes are the egg catching up, not the egg cooking. Anything under 45 minutes is not the temperature you think it is, and the difference between 45 and 60 minutes is small compared with a single degree on the dial.

The bands, by yolk

135 °F / 57 °C — Raw-textured, warm, still completely liquid. Nothing has set, because nothing in an egg sets this low. This is a pasteurizing band, not a cooking band, and it needs longer than an hour. See the next section.
141 to 145 °F / 60.5 to 63 °C — Yolk very runny and velvety, just past liquid. The white turns opaque but stays loose, because this is where ovotransferrin goes at about 144 °F / 62 °C and nothing else does. This is the onsen tamago band. Serve it cracked into a bowl — it will not peel, and it is not supposed to.
148 to 150 °F / 64.5 to 65.5 °C — Yolk thick, jammy, fudge-like. This is the classic ramen-egg yolk and the band most people are actually looking for. The white is a soft set custard: holdable with a spoon, not with your fingers.
155 to 160 °F / 68 to 71 °C — Yolk firm and spreadable, tipping toward crumbly at the top of the band. The white is finally firm enough to handle, though still softer and more tender than a boiled one.
165 °F / 74 °C — Hard-cooked: firm, moist and not powdery, with no grey-green ring, because the egg never goes anywhere near the temperature that makes one. Treat 45 minutes as the floor rather than the middle. If your yolks come out looking translucent, go to 167 °F / 75 °C for a full hour and they will not.

Pasteurizing in the shell — 75 minutes, not 45

The number is 135 °F / 57 °C for 1 hour 15 minutes. Baldwin’s sous vide guide says at least that, and the commercial in-shell process assumes roughly the same order of hold. At 45 to 60 minutes the egg has only just arrived at temperature and has barely started accumulating any lethality at all.
It comes out looking and behaving raw, which is the entire point. This is the band for Caesar dressing, mayonnaise, aioli, eggnog, mousse and tartare — anywhere a raw egg goes in and never gets cooked.
Commercial pasteurized shell eggs are held to a 5-log reduction of Salmonella and are audited on it. A pot in your kitchen is not audited, so treat this as a large reduction in risk rather than a guarantee, and buy the pasteurized ones if you are cooking for somebody pregnant, elderly or immune-compromised.

Setting a sous vide stick

This is the right tool for anything below 160 °F, and it is not close. Set the temperature, put the eggs in straight from the fridge, and start the clock when they go in — the 40-minute come-up is already accounted for in the 45 to 60 minute figure.
Lower them on a spoon or sit them in a rack. An egg dropped onto the bottom of the pot cracks, and one cracked egg clouds the whole bath.
Ice bath afterwards if they are not going straight onto a plate. It stops the carry-over and firms the white enough to be handled.
Six eggs cook the same as one. Temperature control means the pot does not care how much you put in it, which is the one genuine advantage over every other method here.

Setting an induction hob

An induction hob’s numbers are POWER, not temperature. Even the models with a temperature mode are reading the PAN BOTTOM, and the pan bottom runs hotter than the water every moment the element is actually on. Published work on pan-bottom sensing puts the error at roughly plus or minus 10 °C, which is wider than the entire jammy band.
So drive it from a probe thermometer sitting in the WATER, and treat the hob’s dial as an unlabelled knob you nudge. Use the widest, heaviest pot you own with at least 3 to 4 quarts of water in it: the thermal mass is what smooths out the hob’s on-off cycling into a steady number.
The low bands are where a hob is worst. Below about 155 °F many units are still delivering more power at their minimum setting than a pot of water needs to hold station, so you spend the hour chasing the target up and down. Above 160 °F it gets easy. Under 150 °F, use the stick.
Calibrate once and write the number down, the same way the canning settings are written down, then never change the pot. That number is a personal artifact — it belongs to your hob, your pot and your water, and it does not transfer to anyone else’s.
The exception is a hob with a real liquid probe, such as the Breville Control Freak. Those hold actual liquid temperature and behave like a circulator, because they are measuring the thing you care about instead of a proxy for it.

Steaming

Steaming is a TIME method, not a temperature method — the steam is at 212 °F / 100 °C and there is no dial. What it buys you is consistency and peelability, which is why it is the better default for anything you intend to peel and marinate.
An inch of water, a steamer basket, lid on, brought to a full boil BEFORE the eggs go in. Then lower them in, cover, and start the timer.
From the fridge, roughly: 6 minutes for a runny soft-boiled yolk, 7 for jammy, 10 to 11 for medium, 12 to 13 for hard-cooked. Ice bath immediately, every time.
Treat those numbers as a starting point and calibrate them once in your own steamer. Egg size matters more than people expect — heat reaches the centre in time that goes as the SQUARE of the radius, so a jumbo egg is not “a bit longer” than a large one.
Why it beats boiling: dropping cold eggs into boiling water pulls the water temperature down and the recovery depends on how many eggs and how big the pot is. Steam does not drop. Every batch starts at the same 212 °F, so your calibrated number keeps working.
Steamed eggs also peel better, reliably enough that it is worth doing for that alone. The popular explanation — that vapour permeates the shell and forms a barrier — is not credible; a shell is not a screen door. The likelier mechanism is thermal: condensing steam dumps heat into the shell far faster than hot water does, so the outermost skin of white sets almost instantly and shrinks away from the membrane. NOT FOUND: any controlled study isolating the mechanism, so take the effect as real and the explanation as reasoning.
Peelability is still mostly about egg AGE, not method. Steaming helps a fresh egg; a week in the fridge helps more.

The Evoloop cookers — 6-egg and 12-egg

Both units are steamers with the dial taken away. Water goes on the heating plate, the eggs sit above it in a tray, and a thermostat cuts the power and sounds the buzzer the moment the plate runs dry. Everything you control, you control through that one puddle of water.
MORE WATER MEANS HARDER EGGS, because more water means a longer run before the plate dries. That is exactly why the cup’s lowest mark is soft-boiled and the top mark is hard — see Egg Cooker Reference (EVOLOOP) for the working procedure.
MORE EGGS MEANS LESS WATER, which reads backwards until you see why: cold eggshells condense steam and it drips back onto the plate, so a full tray keeps the plate wet longer than a single egg does. Evoloop state the rule; the mechanism here is my reasoning, not theirs.
Pierce the wide end of each egg with the pin in the cup before it goes in. The blunt end holds the air cell, and giving that air somewhere to go is what stops the shell splitting as it expands.
On the 12-egg unit the second tray stacks above the first, further from the plate. Expect the upper tray to run slightly softer than the lower one, and check it before you assume they match — if it is real, it is worth about half a mark on the cup or a swap halfway through.
The cup markings on YOUR units are the authority, not any number written here. The two models hold different amounts of water and are calibrated separately, so treat the 6-egg and the 12-egg as two different appliances that happen to share a badge.
Ice bath the moment the buzzer goes. The cooker has no way to stop cooking an egg it has already heated, so the carry-over is yours to manage.

If you actually want to PEEL it

Set the white first, with real heat. Nothing in the temperature bands above will do it, because the white’s majority protein needs about 176 °F / 80 °C and the bands top out at 165.
HOT AND FAST is the simplest answer and needs no equipment: steam or boil the egg to your calibrated jammy number, ice bath, peel. You give up the fine control over the yolk and you get a peelable egg, which for a marinated egg is the trade that matters.
THE HYBRID is the answer if you want both: boil or steam 3 to 4 minutes, ice bath, then hold at your chosen band for 45 minutes, ice bath, peel. The short blast sets the outer skin of white hard enough to survive peeling; the long hold takes the yolk exactly where you want it.
Buy the eggs a week early. Albumen above pH 8.9 peels cleanly, and an egg gets there on its own by sitting in the fridge losing CO2. Farm-fresh eggs are the worst possible eggs for this job — that one is proven causally, not folklore.

Notes

About cracking the shells and marinating in hot liquid.

The idea is to put whole eggs into the braising liquid at about 150 °F for 20 minutes, crack them, and return them to the same liquid at the same setting for an hour or more. It ought to work, and it does not, for three separate reasons — none of which is a safety problem.

1 - At 20 minutes there is nothing to crack. A fridge-cold egg needs 40 to 45 minutes just to reach 150 °F, so at the 20-minute mark the middle of the egg is still on its way up and nothing has set.

2 - Even at full equilibrium, 150 °F leaves the white a fragile custard, because the protein that makes a white firm needs about 176 °F. This is not a marginal call: it is precisely why onsen tamago — cooked in exactly this range — is served cracked into a bowl instead of peeled. The technique and the temperature already exist, and the reason they never get combined with peeling is this one.

3 - Once an egg IS peeled, an hour in hot marinade is the wrong move anyway. Diffusion speeds up sharply with temperature: from fridge to 65 °C the diffusion coefficient rises roughly four to five fold, which is about double the penetration depth in the same time. That sounds like a win until you remember what is being pushed in — salt, which reaches the outer white first and keeps going. You get a salty, rubbery, shrunken rim and the yolk still gets nothing, because it was never a question of speed. (The 4-5x is computed from the standard temperature-and-viscosity scaling, not measured in egg gel — treat it as an order of magnitude.)

The technique this is being confused with is the tea egg, and its order is the opposite. Hard-cook the eggs FIRST, then crack the shells — crack, not peel — and then simmer them in the liquid for as long as you like. The set white is what holds the egg together while the cracks let the liquid in, and that is where the marbling comes from. Every marbled egg tradition works this way round.

So the working sequence for a soy or ramen egg is: set the white with real heat, chill, peel, and marinate COLD. If you want a precise yolk on top of that, use the hybrid in the directions — a short boil, then the hold — and still marinate cold afterwards.

On safety, since hot marinating sounds risky and mostly is not. A hold at 150 °F sits above 135 °F, which is the top of the danger zone in the FDA Food Code, so an hour in the pot is a texture and seasoning problem rather than a pathogen one. The dangerous version of this is the same egg held BELOW 135 °F, or a cracked egg left to cool slowly in its liquid on the counter — cracking the shell is exactly what removes the barrier the egg was relying on. That is not a hypothetical: it is the mechanism behind the CDC’s home-pickled-egg botulism case, where the brine was perfectly acidic and the eggs had been punctured.

Sources and honesty.

Douglas Baldwin, “A Practical Guide to Sous Vide Cooking” — in-shell pasteurization at 135 °F / 57 °C for 1 hr 15 min, and ovotransferrin at 144 °F / 62 °C.
USDA FSIS, Salmonella Enteritidis risk assessment, Annex G — pasteurization of liquid egg products and shell eggs.
IFT, “Pasteurization of Shell Eggs” — the commercial in-shell process and its 5-log Salmonella standard.
FDA Food Code 3-501.16 — hot holding at 135 °F or above.
Protein set points, the peeling pH threshold and the diffusion arithmetic are worked through on the website under Marinated Eggs.

NOT RETRIEVED: the printed Evoloop manual. Its usual host blocks automated readers, so the water-level rules here come from Evoloop’s own product page plus the procedure already written down in Egg Cooker Reference (EVOLOOP). The cup markings on the units in the cupboard beat both.

The 45-to-60-minute figures, the four upper bands and the yolk descriptions came from Jeff and hold up. The two corrections are the pasteurizing hold (75 minutes, not 45 to 60) and the fact that every one of these bands describes a yolk inside a white that is nowhere near ready.