hard-cooked eggs

A perfect hard-cooked egg peels easily and has a perfect yellow yolk. Unfortunately, this recipe only scored on one of these - the yolk looked fine but the shell takes huge chunks of egg white with it.

This recipe has you put eggs into cool water, bring them to a boil, turn off the heat, cover the pan, and time (9 minutes). We then followed Bittman's advice, and plunged the eggs into an ice water bath.

Why did this fail us? For one thing, its not that clear cut when to turn the water off - when it starts boiling, or when it comes to a roiling boil? Alternatively, its failure could be related to our altitude. We live at close to 6000 ft, and boiling water is 6ËšC lower than at sea level.

Next easter, I'll try an alternative method.