Hard Boiled Eggs - in the OVEN?

First there was bacon, now it is EGGS.  There has been many a pinterest post talking about baking eggs to cook them instead of boiling them in water.  I was extremely hesitant at first, but thought OK, if Alton Brown, cooking science mastermind approves of them then I shall try it for myself.  Not to mention, I really needed to cook a large number of eggs and doing them all in the oven might save me some time!

So throwing caution to the wind and with great abandon (ok, with gentle abandon) I put the eggs directly on the oven rack...

It felt very wrong to put these eggs right on the oven rack

This was sort of a leap of faith, since this was every single egg I was going to dye with the kids later, so if it didn't work out, I was going to have to run to the store for more eggs (talk about putting all your eggs "in one basket" so to speak).  

Next you set the oven to 325º for 30 minutes (place a cookie sheet underneath them in case one of them cracks or explodes) - then walk away!  That's right. No watching if it boils over, nothing. Nada.  Do your nails, do a load of laundry, play a couple songs on guitar hero and voila, thirty minutes later you have hard "boiled" eggs.  Shortly after you get them out of the oven, you are to put them in a large bowl filled with ice water.  I thought for SURE the drastic temperature drop would crack or destroy them but alas, I was incorrect.  They were fine.  Not one of them cracked actually.  Also they had little brown specks on them coming out of the oven, but they all washed off in the ice water bath.  After they cooled I put them in the fridge over night but was dying to know if they worked or not.  So in the morning, I cracked into one.  My method is tapping it all over with a spoon and running it under cold water, the shell came right off, so that was a good sign!

Here is my perfectly peeled hard "boiled" aka oven cooked egg.  The "believers" in this method claim four things:  

1.  It eliminates the dark ring around the yolk that is caused by boiling
2.  It makes a creamier tastier egg
3.  It cuts down on the sulfur flavor and smell
4.  It allow for many eggs to be cooked at once

So I was nervous to cut it open... but here goes nothin'.

Well as you can see there is a tiny bit of darker color around the edge, not too bad.  I guess I can attest for #4 on the list (saving time) but the jury is still out on me for numbers one through three.  Still had a slight dark ring (and I used fresh eggs), as far as extra creamy, I really could tell no difference.  It was good of course, just not oozing creaminess.  Also the eliminating the sulfur smell, these were just as stinky as regular eggs.  When the fridge door is opened, you can get a whiff of them, and when I cut one open to make an egg salad sandwich my 4 year old said, mommy, something is rotten (ha).  So all in all I'd say this was a great experiment.  Does it live up to all the hype?  Not sure.  Does it save time and allow you do cook tons of eggs at once with an almost "set it and forget it" mentality?  YES.