The 8 Best Electric Egg Cookers

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.

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.

If you’re in the market for purchasing an all-metal egg cooker, we can easily recommend the VORBAGA electric egg cooker. All the electric egg cookers we previously tested were BPA-free, but all had a plastic element, like the egg tray or the dome. If you want to stay clear of plastic, the VORBAGA is an excellent option. The dome, the egg tray, and the egg-poaching/omelet tray are all made of stainless steel, so no plastic comes in contact with your food. The only plastic item is the water-measuring cup, which like other egg cookers we tested, has a built-in pin for piercing the top of each egg.

Although the stainless steel egg tray and poaching tray are not non-stick, buttering the poaching tray beforehand helped with sliding the poached eggs out onto the plate. During testing we also found that the VORBAGA’s cooking times were spot-on, and hard- and medium-boiled eggs turned out perfect.Read more…

We did get good results poaching eggs, but because we couldn’t see through the metal dome — as was the case with the Cuisinart egg cooker — we had to keep checking to see that the yolks weren’t cooked solid, which happened when we initially followed the manufacturer’s recommendation.

The only issue we had with VORBAGA is that there is no sound alert when the water has evaporated from the tray, signaling the eggs are done. It does have an automatic shut-off, but a beep or ding would be a nice addition.

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.

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.

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.

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.

For this 2023 update, we were specifically looking for egg cookers that had metal rather than plastic parts that came in contact with food. Strictly speaking, of course, the Nordic Ware egg cooker is not electric and cooks eggs in the microwave. Resembling an ostrich egg, the cooker divides in half into two plastic pieces and has an aluminum-tray insert for cooking four eggs. The interior of the cooker’s dome is lined with aluminum, so the eggs don’t actually touch any plastic. The Nordic Ware cannot make poached eggs or omelets.

The bottom half of the cooker must be 3/4-full with water before adding the eggs onto the egg tray. In effect, the cooker boils the water and the eggs are steamed through vents in the tray. The Nordic Ware’s instructions have cooking times for soft, medium, and hard-boiled for three microwave oven wattages — 600, 800, and 1,000. We tested the egg cooker in a 1000-watt microwave, during our tests, the recommended times were off.Read more…

For example, we programmed the microwave for a medium-hard egg and wound up with a medium poached egg. It took three tries to get a properly cooked hard-boiled egg by experimenting with times. Another flaw to the Nordic Ware is that the cooker gets very hot, so you need to take care when removing it from the microwave.