Weight Maven

I have a new gadget! It’s a Cuisinart egg cooker I’m using to make hard-boiled eggs.

Now, I did consider Alton Brown’s criticism of unitaskers before I clicked “buy.” I also considered some of the larger food steamers so I could use it for other things, but didn’t like the comments about BPA in the plastic of those products.

Why hard-boiled? Normally, I prefer my eggs scrambled or in an omelette, but I was looking at a way to bring eggs to work for breakfast, and hard-boiled fits the bill.

Why eggs? As the side-bar of my blog mentions, I’m into primal nutrition (aka the paleo diet*). And eggs — especially those from pastured chickens — are a great way to get healthy fats and nutrients into your diet:

Egg yolks are also high in choline, which is starting to get a lot of attention as protection against inflammation. So if you’re concerned that eating eggs is bad for your heart, think again!

So how’d it work?

Two words: loved it!

I’ll grant you that making hard-boiled eggs the traditional way isn’t exactly hard. But it turns out that steaming them is even easier, it’s a lot faster, and you use/waste far less water.

Side note: One thing I learned the hard way is that you don’t want to hard-boil fresh eggs from the farmers market. Fresh eggs are a royal pain to peel! The easy solution with fresh eggs is to let them sit for a week before you cook them.

Making the eggs is really easy. The Cuisinart can cook up to 7 eggs in the shell at once (or three poached), so cooking a half-dozen at a time worked well for me.

There’s a little measuring cup you use with markings that tell you how much water you need for the number of eggs and the desired doneness. You pour the water onto the heating plate. I’d say into, but the plate is really a flat plate … it’s surprising how little water you need to steam eggs. And interestingly, you need less water for more eggs.

The Cuisinart manual suggests using distilled water in the cooker “since tap water has minerals that can cause discoloration of the eggs.” I used tap water and didn’t notice any problems. But since I happen to have a gallon (thinking I needed it to mix with antifreeze), I’ll give that a try next time and see if it makes any difference.

The measuring cup also has a tiny little pin on the bottom that you use to pierce each egg before you cook it. I was envisioning raw egg all over the place as I broke egg after egg trying to insert this pin, but it was easy to do — no broken eggs!

After that, you turn on the power and in minutes, the eggs are done. The manual says that it automatically shuts off the heating element at this point, which is true, but the timer keeps going off until you turn off the power switch on the cooker (otherwise, when the heating element cools down, it will turn back on).

You do have to be a bit careful of the steam (I tilt the cover away from me when I open it), but at that point, it’s just like dealing with traditional eggs. You want to get them in cold water as soon as possible to stop the cooking, then you can peel them or toss them in the fridge til you need them.

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* [As an aside, just as there are different flavors of vegetarianism, there are different flavors of paleo/primal.Two big differences are/have been whether or or not the diet contained saturated fat and dairy. Paleo adherents (like Loren Cordain) typically don’t include either of these, while primal folks (like Mark Sisson) do. But that’s for a future post, especially since the paleo folks seem to be coming around on saturated fat. Me, I’m currently including both.]