We hard-boiled, poached, and steamed five dozen eggs in six electric egg cookers and have determined that the Elite Gourmet – EGC-007B is the best egg cooker. A close runner-up is the DASH – Rapid Egg Cooker, another consistent and affordable egg cooker that turned out hard-boiled eggs with jammy yolks and perfect poached eggs for any breakfast or brunch dish.
We hard-boiled, poached, and steamed five dozen eggs in six electric egg cookers and have determined that the Elite Gourmet – EGC-007B is the best egg cooker. A close runner-up is the DASH – Rapid Egg Cooker, another consistent and affordable egg cooker that turned out hard-boiled eggs with jammy yolks and perfect poached eggs for any breakfast or brunch dish.
Hard-boiling eggs and poaching eggs take a bit more kitchen know-how than frying or scrambling eggs. You need to time both exactly to produce a hard-boiled egg with a jammy center or a perfectly set poached egg that explodes a runny yolk over an English muffin. An electric egg cooker takes out the guesswork of when an egg is over- or under-done. When it came to hard-boiled eggs, five of the six egg cookers we tested were pretty much “set it and forget it.” Poaching eggs was a different story; we found that it was best to check the eggs once or twice to make sure they were done.
An electric egg cooker is incredibly convenient if you want to cook a large batch of hard-boiled eggs for deviled eggs or egg salad for a party or picnic. With a double-tiered egg cooker — like the BELLA or Cuisinart models we tested — you can cook 10-12 eggs in 15 minutes, so you’ll always have a quick snack or protein bite at hand. What you should be aware of is that you’ll need to experiment with an egg cooker and be willing to sacrifice a few eggs before you’ll get them the way you like.
Our testing entailed making boiled eggs, poached eggs, and “omelets” (as all egg cookers erroneously call them) by first following the instruction manual. We believed this would be a good way to start since most people will follow the instructions if they’ve never used an egg cooker before. The only egg cooker that performed perfectly the first time was our top pick, Elite Gourmet. Our tests with the other egg cookers resulted in a dozen ruined eggs dumped down the garbage disposal.
The following features are what we determined to be essential for an electric egg cooker.
Calibrated heating plate
The egg cooker heating plate resembles a mini hotplate. Depending on how you want your eggs done, you’ll add water from an included measuring cup onto the heating element, load the eggs onto a plastic rack, then cover them with a plastic dome. As the heating plate heats — usually very quickly — the water boils and creates steam inside the dome. So, in effect, egg cookers steam eggs. When the water evaporates, the eggs are done. It’s important that the heating plate maintains an even temperature and doesn’t get too hot, or eggs will always overcook, as was the case with the Cuisinart model.
Automatic turn-off and alarm
One of the benefits of an egg cooker is that you don’t need to stand over it and watch to see when the eggs are done. Almost all the egg cookers we tested had an automatic turn-off when the water had evaporated and an alarm to alert us that the eggs were done. The Hamilton Beach only had an indicator light, so we had to keep an eye on it for when it went out.
Clearly marked measuring cup
Since the doneness of eggs depends on how much water is added to the heating element, it’s important that the included measuring cup is clearly marked. Many of the egg cookers had marks all over the cup indicating doneness, number of eggs, and style of eggs, and it was unnecessarily confusing, especially when they were printed in milliliters and the instructions in ounces. Elite Gourmet won out again with simplicity and clarity by having only three marks for hard, medium, and soft, no matter the number or style of eggs being cooked.
Eggshell piercing pin
When hard-boiling eggs, it’s recommended that you pierce one end of the egg before boiling, which helps the egg retain its oval shape. An egg cooker’s measuring cup has a sharp pin built into the bottom of the cup for piercing eggs.
Omelet vs steamed eggs
All egg cookers have “omelet” as an alternative to boiled and poached. Be aware that this is not a traditional omelet; it’s simply steamed eggs that puff up to double their volume. Almost all the egg cookers produced an irregularly shaped “omelet” with a weird, spongy texture that we found unappetizing. The only egg cooker that gave us an edible “omelet” was the Dash Rapid Egg Cooker; it didn’t puff as high and would be great for a breakfast sandwich.
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Elite Gourmet - EGC-007B
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Compared to a couple of the other egg cookers we tested, the Elite Gourmet looks unimpressive, but don’t judge an egg cooker by its looks. The Elite Gourmet’s simplicity and consistency are why we chose it as our top pick. Its egg rack holds seven eggs, and it comes with a poaching tray and an omelet tray, just like the other egg cookers. But a standout feature that we loved is that the egg rack and poaching tray have vertical handles, which makes lifting them out of the egg cooker much easier than side handles and also reduces the risk of burning your fingers on the hot plate.
The Elite Gourmet’s measuring cup is also well-designed to be user-friendly. We didn’t have to decipher any confusing codes. The cup has only three markings for water level, each with icons of an egg cooked hard, medium, and soft, no matter how many eggs you’re cooking. We also found the egg cooker’s instruction booklet comprehensive and easy to understand. It’s loaded with recipes, including one for hollandaise sauce, and it was the only manual that instructed piercing the eggshell on the top, which prevented egg white from spilling out.Read more…
As for our testing, the Elite Gourmet was the only egg cooker that gave us perfect results the first time we used it. Hard-boiled eggs had brightly colored jammy yolks, and the poached eggs had just the right consistency with just-set whites and appetizingly oozy yolks. The Elite Gourmet is available in several cheery colors and is less than $20, a real bargain for such an excellent egg cooker.
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DASH - Rapid Egg Cooker
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The Dash Rapid Egg Cooker has many of the same attributes as the Elite Gourmet. It’s a bit cuter in appearance with the lower half resembling the bottom of an egg and four chubby egg-shaped legs. Neither the egg rack nor the poaching tray has a built-in handle, but the rack comes with a detachable shaft that’s inserted through the center, which then serves as a handle for lifting the rack off the heating plate.
The Dash has the automatic turn-off feature, and instead of an annoying buzzy alarm, it plays a cheerful little tune when the eggs are done. We also liked that the dome locks into the cooker’s side handles, thus sealing in the steam. The measuring cup is virtually the same as Elite Gourmet’s. It has three markings and icons for hard, medium, and soft-boiled eggs, but there is also a mark for an “omelet” and poached eggs, which is the same water level for medium-cooked eggs.Read more…
The Dash has a six-egg capacity and cooked perfect hard-boiled eggs in 11 minutes. It also produced a very good poached egg, although some of the white had bubbled out of the poaching tray and onto the heating plate. We got great results cooking an “omelet” that didn’t puff out of proportion and was moist and enjoyable to heat. We could easily envision it sandwiched between bacon or ham and cheese. The Dash Rapid Egg Cooker comes in seven colors and is slightly more expensive than the Elite Gourmet, running a little over $20.
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BELLA - Double Tier Egg Cooker
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You can cook 12 eggs at once in the BELLA Double Tier Egg Cooker. It comes with two egg racks, each holding six eggs. You load one egg rack with six eggs, insert a 2.5″ collar that locks into place, then lay the second rack on top of the eggs, and load it with six more eggs. This double-tier feature also allows for duo cooking of hard-boiled eggs and poached eggs, four poached eggs at once (two poaching trays are included), or two poached eggs and an “omelet.”
We were intrigued by this concept and tried it out with hard-boiled eggs and poached eggs. Sadly, it didn’t work because the poached eggs were done several minutes before the hard-boiled eggs. However, when cooked separately rather than together, both came out great. As for the “omelet,” it puffed up like a souffle but with a flat center, and it had a spongy texture. The BELLA measuring cup is pretty clear with markings for the water levels for the number of eggs and doneness, but the instruction booklet is unnecessarily confusing with measurements in milliliters and fluid ounces, neither of which is marked on the cup.Read more…
The BELLA has the automatic turn-off feature and a loud alarm that can only be stopped by pushing the power button. During testing, the heating plate got spotted by water, and scrubbing it did not remove the spots. The BELLA egg cooker is even less expensive than our top pick, and if you’re looking to cook dozens of eggs in a short time, it’s a very good choice.
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Hamilton Beach - Electric Egg Cooker
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The Hamilton Beach egg cooker will certainly give you excellent hard-boiled eggs, as long as you’re willing to do some trial and error. There’s nothing inherently wrong with it, but you’ll need to employ your best Sherlock Holmes skills to figure out the measuring cup, which is the bane of many an Amazon reviewer. On one side of the cup, the water-level markings are pretty clear — the number of eggs and doneness — although it’s counter-intuitive as to why the water level for seven hard-boiled eggs is the same as one medium-boiled egg. On the opposite side of the cup, printed in an absurdly tiny font, are markings for hard-boiled, soft-, medium-, and hard-poached, and one- or two-egg “omelet.”
All well and good, except that the water levels are for 8, 10, 12, and 14 hard-boiled eggs, but the cooker only has a 7-egg capacity. Further confusion abounds in why the water level for 14 eggs is the same for a one-egg “omelet.” Hard-boiled eggs cooked well in 15 minutes, and although the Hamilton Beach doesn’t have an auto turn-off, its loud alarm indicated the eggs were done.Read more…
We had to experiment a few times to get decent poached eggs by reducing cooking time and water levels. The “omelet” tray could hold only two eggs — the other egg cookers held three — and we got the usual overly puffed-up results. The Hamilton Beach egg cooker is more expensive than our top pick and runner-up, but it’s not as good a product.
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DASH - Egg Bite Maker
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The DASH Egg Bite Maker’s sole purpose is to make “omelets” and mini egg bites, neither of which it does well. Whereas we liked the DASH Rapid Egg Cooker’s “omelet,” the Egg Bite Maker’s “omelet” was disappointing. Calling this product “sous-vide style” is simply just wrong and definitely false advertising. It works exactly the same as the other egg cookers, using steam to cook eggs.
Despite its popularity, the egg bite maker is not in the same league as the DASH Rapid Egg Cooker. It has no power button; you turn it on and off by plugging and unplugging it. It has no indicator light for when the eggs are done. The instruction booklet guesstimates between 10-12 minutes for an “omelet”, but we needed to check every 5 minutes to make sure it wasn’t overcooked. The egg bite maker doesn’t come with a measuring cup, so as the booklet instructs, you measure water with one of the mini cups (four are included). Since this measurement is so inaccurate, the water never completely evaporated, and we had to drain it out for every test.Read more…
Perhaps we could somewhat ignore this product’s inadequacies if it made a good “omelet.” But it was no different from the other egg cookers — excluding the DASH Rapid Egg Cooker — and we got spongy results, and in the case of the mini bites, sponge discs. Interestingly, the instruction booklet has photos of a whole steamed egg but doesn’t have instructions for making one. So, we experimented by cracking an egg into the “omelet” tray, and it came out as a flat but perfect poached egg. At 30 bucks, the DASH Egg Bite Maker is too expensive for what it is.
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Cuisinart - CEC-10
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The Cuisinart – CEC-10 egg cooker is the most expensive of the units we tested, and although it was certainly the most attractive egg cooker, it also wasn’t the best. The Cuisinart’s heating plate is no different from the others we tested, except for one important factor: It gets too hot and overcooks the eggs. Hard-boiled eggs had pale, mealy yolks and rubbery whites, poached eggs were hard or the whites had boiled over the sides of the poached-egg tray and burned on the heating plate. The Cuisinart’s egg-poaching tray is divided into four pie-shaped slices, and perhaps this odd shape is why the poached eggs boiled over.
The Cuisinart’s measuring cup is less confusing but wildly inaccurate. The water level for a one-to-three egg “omelet” is the same as hard-boiling one-to-ten eggs. Similarly, the water level for poaching one-to-four eggs is the same as medium-boiling one-to-ten eggs. Another problem with the Cuisinart is its gorgeous brushed-stainless dome. The other egg cookers we tested had clear plastic domes, so we could always see how the eggs were cooking. But to check the eggs in the Cuisinart, we had to lift its pretty dome, which released the built-up steam.Read more…
Our first attempt with an “omelet” gave us a huge Julia Child puffy confection, but by adding less water, we got a normal-size “omelet.” For an egg cooker this expensive, you shouldn’t have to experiment to just get better-than-average results.
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Gene Gerrard, Writer
Gene Gerrard was recently voted as one of the top five personal chefs in Los Angeles. He created About.com's Meat and Wild Game Cooking website and published hundreds of recipes, interviews, cookbook reviews and blog posts about food trends. Gene is also a professional magician, and when he's not writing for Your Best Digs, he's performing at the World Famous Magic Castle in Hollywood.
