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Comment by rickdale | Hacker News Reader

I own a hard boil egg maker. Takes less than 20 minutes to make 7 perfect hard boiled eggs. If I am patient enough to wait another 20 minutes after that the eggs peel perfectly and are still warm and delicious.

http://www.amazon.com/KRUPS-F23070-Cooker-Indicator-capacity...

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Contraptions that are single-purpose and do their job well are defensible, IMHO, yet I still dislike the space and specialized cleaning requirements of devices like this.

My household hard-cooks all of our eggs in a rice cooker with a steamer tray insert (Zojirushi NHS-10). The cooking time is set by the amount of water you add. We mainly err on the side of overcooked (more water), because nobody likes soft yolks.

The rice cooker and convection/toaster oven have been the two most universally useful appliances in our kitchen, and they are both still operational after an average of 15 years in service. Other gadgets have come and gone, and they remain. They have even outlasted four microwave ovens, three slow-cookers, and one full-sized range-top oven.

A rice cooker is useful enough in every home kitchen that I consider it a dire omission that they didn't even get a mention in the article. Ours can cook a dozen eggs in 15 minutes, most of that time can be spent doing something else, and there's no boiling water to pour out.

Just to add, Zojirushi are top of the line rice cookers and I would expect that they outlast most other appliances.

Try this then: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B008LTIYN2 toaster and egg maker in one, and it can synchronize them.

It has the same problem, along with not easily being able to replace 1/2 of it.

I used to have one of those, but a few months ago I switched to the pressure cooker method (electric one, the [Instan Pot][1]):

  - cook the eggs 6 minutes on low pressure.
  - cool down (10 minutes).
  - shock the eggs with iced water.

I know what the article says but in my experience pressure cooked eggs are much, much easy to peel.

[1]: http://instantpot.com/

It takes less time to make 7 (or 3, or 12) perfect boiled eggs in a saucepan, it's trivial to do and to clean! I note your cooker also poaches eggs, though, which is much trickier in a pan (unless you have your own chooks, or a similarly fresh source of eggs).

Does it take less time? I have a similar cooker and it uses ~1 cup of water for completely hard boiled eggs (total capacity 10 eggs[0]). The cooker rings a bell when the water has completely boiled off, which is closer to 10 minutes than 20 minutes for this model. I think total capacity is 10 eggs.

Now, in a saucepan the water doesn't have to boil off completely, but you also have significantly more water.

That isn't to say I use this unitasker all the time, I usually don't remember to have eggs around often enough!

[0]: http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/61jBthbQW6L._SX425_.jp...

I have a similar egg maker. I like the fact that it is very water and energy efficient. It's also interesting that as you boil more eggs, it requires less water.

Assuming it's 1kg of plastic, manufacturing it cost about 180 litres of water and 80MJ of energy.

I can bring 12 pans of water to boil with that energy, and have lots of water to spare.

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