How long does it take to boil an ostrich egg?

The answer is... 48 to 60 minutes for a soft-boiled egg and 1 to 1.5 hours for a hard-boiled one--at sea level. You might wonder what hat I pulled these numbers from. It wasn't an easy hat to find. As you discovered--the numbers vary all over the map. So I contacted ostrich ranchers all over the map: England, Africa, Canada, Australia, Malaysia, and the USA. That's the answer I got.

After hard boiling the egg for 1.5 hours, the Flemings of Saanichton Christmas Tree & Ostrich farm in Canada, make deviled ostrich egg sandwiches. One ostrich egg, scrambled, fills a 12-inch frying pan to the brim. Ostrich eggs taste similar to chicken eggs: light and fluffy.

The boiling times vary, I suspect, for a couple of reasons. Low answers (like 40 minutes for a hard-boiled egg) result from blithely scaling up the time it takes to boil a chicken egg. That won't work because an ostrich egg has a shiny, whitish shell built to sustain a 345-pound weight--an adult male ostrich. That's a whopping thick shell the heat must penetrate before it even starts cooking the egg. The shell stays too hot to touch for two hours afterwards. Beware.

Perhaps a fear of undercooking a six-inch long, grapefruit-size egg gives rise to the extremely long time estimates. Who wants to crack a "hard-boiled" ostrich egg and get egg on their face?

By the way, the ostrich egg is the largest egg laid by all living creatures but the smallest bird egg in relation to the hen's size. (Wonder Quest)