Boiling Potatoes and Eggs

I thought I would try a homemade potato salad for dinner. We didn't have any potato salad dressing so I just mixed up some mayonnaise and lemon juice for the dressing. That's what Taste.com.au told me to do. Technically, this is an easy salad to whip up. I just had minor problems with the boiled egg I was adding to the salad.

I was supposed to boil the potatoes and add the dressing onto the potato while it was still warm. That way the potato absorbs the flavor in. But when my potato was cooked, my eggs were still not done. Who knew it took more than five minutes to boil an egg? I had managed to crack one of them when putting them in the pan and when I checked it, it was still a bit soft. I had to again put some water to boil and boil the eggs for another five minutes to harden them.

I knew there were a lot of theories around boiling eggs. I remember listening to a conversation on the radio or TV, where they were having a quite passionate discussion about how to boil an egg. And it is not as simple as it sounds. I had thought it took only about three minutes, and had left it for five minutes just to make sure. But after looking up on how to boil an egg on a few websites, I see that I had done quite a few things wrong.
Wikipedia gives the run down of the theories behind boiling eggs. Some say you put the egg in cold water and then put it to heat, while others say that you boil the water first and then put the eggs in. All the other websites I checked was consistent in asking us to do the former. I had done the latter.

It was also important that we make sure that the eggs are in room temperature. I had just taken mine out of the refrigerator.

A Sydney chef, Brahimi reckons that the eggs should be covered with water when they boil. Half of the water had evaporated in my pan and they were only half covered. I did, however, run cold water on the eggs to make the peeling of eggs a bit easier, as he had recommended. I did not burn my fingertips at the process.

Mr. Breakfast said that we are supposed to let the eggs simmer in for about 12 minutes! I had no patient to let that happen for I had already struggled with boiling the egg for about 10 minutes. You can apparently just leave the eggs in hot water for about 10 minutes as well. I think that's where Mr. Breakfast is coming from.

After all this, it is pretty straight froward. Peeling the egg is the fun part. As long as you have not over cooked the egg, the shell comes off easily. A little tip: make sure you stir the egg when it is boiling in the pan, this helps the egg yolk to be in the center when it boils (I had forgotten to do this as well that day).

As for the potato salad dressing, I tasted it after I mixed in all my ingredients. At first it tasted a bit weird, maybe it was too much lemon juice or the dried basil I put in (I think it was either Maggie Beer or Nigella Lawson, or both, who always insists on fresh herbs and now I do know why). But I after I left the salad to rest, the taste was good and we had none leftover.
And for anyone who is curious about boiling an egg, here are the websites I looked into:

http://www.mrbreakfast.com/ask.asp

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiled_egg

http://www.smh.com.au/news/good-living/crack-the-formula-on-boiling-eggs/2006/03/28/1143441128413.html?page=fullpage#contentSwap2

http://www.taste.com.au/recipes/12504/how+to+boil+an+egg