How long to boil a duck egg
Jammy · Duck · Fridge
Get the ice bath ready. Yolks keep setting after the pan comes off.
Duck, quail, altitude and more
Duck eggs are heavier than hen eggs and need longer. Times for soft, jammy and hard, worked out for the weight of your egg.
A typical duck egg weighs about 70 grams against 57 for a large hen egg, so it needs roughly two minutes longer. Around 7 minutes for a runny yolk and 14 and a half for hard.
Weight varies a lot between birds though, more than it does with commercial hen eggs. If you have kitchen scales, weigh one and put the number into the calculator. It makes more difference here than most people expect.
What is different about duck eggs
The yolk is proportionally larger and much richer, and the white is thicker and higher in protein. That thicker white sets firmer than a hen egg white does, which catches people out the first time.
A duck egg cooked to hard boiled has a noticeably rubbery white compared to a hen egg. Most people who eat them regularly stop at jammy for this reason. The yolk is the point anyway.
The shells are thicker and tougher, which is good news for cracking in the pan and bad news for peeling. Give them longer in the ice bath than you would a hen egg.
Buying and storing
Duck eggs usually come from small producers, which means they are often very fresh. Fresh eggs peel badly. Buy them a week before you plan to boil them if you can.
They keep slightly longer than hen eggs raw, because the shell is thicker and less porous. Once boiled, treat them the same as any other egg. A week in the fridge in the shell.
Other boiling times
Egg guides
Common questions
Can you substitute duck eggs for hen eggs?
By weight rather than by count. One duck egg is roughly one and a quarter large hen eggs. Bakers tend to like them because the extra protein in the white gives a firmer set.
Do duck eggs taste different?
Richer and slightly more savoury, mostly because of the larger yolk. Diet affects it more than with hens, so eggs from ducks with pond access taste stronger than ones raised on feed alone.
Egg times come from the thermal-diffusion equation for a spherical egg published by Charles D. H. Williams (University of Exeter), calibrated so a large fridge-cold egg at sea level matches the times cooks actually use. Size, starting temperature and altitude then follow from the physics. Treat the result as a very good starting point, not a guarantee, because pans, hobs and eggs all vary.