Top positive review
5.0 out of 5 starsIt works! It works! I figured it out and now it works!!
Reviewed in the United States on September 21, 2014
I bought this as a gift for my husband for his b-day because he loves egg whites. So he loves hard-boiled and poached eggs because he can just remove the yolk once they're cooked. (Not to mention I was thinking about how nice it would be to be able to hard-boil 10 eggs at a time come Thanksgiving.) Anyway, we were both very excited to use it (myself more so I think than my husband "wink" "wink"). So I read the instructions on how to hard-boil first. The first time I "went for broke" and did the max 10 eggs. I filled the water beaker up to the line specified for 10 hard-boiled eggs and poured it into the base, I punctured the eggs at the "top" like instructed, stacked them all up, put the lid on, switched the lever on and waited for the magic to begin.
Well....the magic that I got was what seemed like every drop of water I put into it leaking out all over my counter. So as that batch finished cooking I placed a dish towel on the counter around the base to catch the water and waited. When the beeper sounded alerting me that they were ready I removed the lid and almost all of the eggs had cooked egg whites pouring out of the holes at the top of the egg and the shells had cracked. I also had quite a bit of stuck on, burned egg white in the cooking base. So I removed all of the exterior egg white from the eggs and began trying to peel them. This was not an easy feat and the shape of the hard-boiled eggs was very displeasing to the eye to say the least. They were barely edible but were in no way anything I would ever be able to use for deviled eggs and I was a little skeptical that I would even be able to get my husband to try them. I ended up cutting them up and using them in a tuna salad and they were fine.
Later I was determined that I had done something wrong and tried another batch (not quite so many this time just in case). I thought "Well, maybe when I punctured the eggs at the top my hole was not directly in the center and faced directly up while they were cooking, causing the egg white to kind of run out the side??" Sounded vaguely plausible but hey I was determined to figure this out. So I got a few more eggs, poured the correct amount of water in the base and took my time making sure I punctured them all as close to what looked like the center of the top of the egg as I could (thinking "I actually hope this doesn't solve the problem because with the time it's taking to do this I might as well be boiling them on the stove.'). So again I put them in and put the lid on and turned it on and waited for the magic. I also placed a towel underneath it this time just in case. As I watched for a bit to see what it would do I was glad that I did because almost immediately the lid began to raise up and down a little causing water to bubble out of the sides and run down on to the towel. Again most of the water had come out of it and when they were finished I took the lid off and had the same results I had the first time.
I decided to get online to see if I could figure out what was going on and if it was actually supposed to give me the results I was getting. Finding very little on the internet other than reviews on Amazon I became even more discouraged.
- There are lots of reviews regarding the water leaking issue followed up by people saying they just go ahead and put a towel beneath it and let it do its thing. But I couldn't imagine that Cuisinart actually made an appliance of any sort that was designed to make a huge mess in your kitchen.
- There are some saying if you have one that leaks water then you more than likely have a defective one and need to return it to the manufacturer for another. If this was the case, with as many people saying that theirs leaked water all over the place it sounded to me that there are actually very few out there that are not defective. So this didn't sound right either.
So I pulled my manual out again thinking maybe there was a step I missed somewhere. I read the instructions for making hard-boiled very carefully, moved on and read the instructions for making poached and the same with omelets. I hadn't missed one step and I had done it exactly how the manual instructed.
So unfortunately I decided that it did, in fact, look like Cuisinart had just made a crappy appliance and that I should have read the reviews before I bought it and got all excited about it. Very saddened by this I continued to flip through the manual, daydreaming about what it could have been like had this little sucker actually worked when....I saw something.... Right there on page 5 under "Tip and Hints" 3rd and 4th bullet points!!
- The eggs should be in the carton large end
up – this will help them stay fresher longer
and will keep the yolks centered. This is a
suggested method for storing eggs.
- ............Always pierce the top of the egg, as in
the side of the egg which was facing up
when stored in the refrigerator.
How did I not know this? The large end of the egg is the TOP?! Seriously? You have got to be kidding me right now! Determined to prove this was not correct I pulled out my carton of eggs, which I just knew ALWAYS had the small end at the top, and you can imagine my complete and utter surprise! The large end was facing up on every single egg. Every one of them!
So I immediately grab a few eggs and tried it again. Put the water in, punctured the eggs on the real TOP, stacked them in, turned it on and waited. No water bubbling out at all....not a drop! Beeper went off and I took the lid off and PERFECT!! All of them Perfect!! Started peeling and the shells all but fell off. Oh.....I was so excited you can't even imagine.
I couldn't believe that the whole problem was my ignorance of which end of the egg was the top. Unbelievable!
So having a few days behind me (because at that point I had more eggs cooked than we could possibly eat) I decided to try my hand at poaching some eggs. Even the reviewers that raved about the hard-boiled eggs flat out said this thing will not make poached eggs, don't even try. But my husband prefers poached to hard-boiled so I had to try as this was a gift for him in the first place.
So I tried it according to the directions only I added a little more water than the beaker suggested for poached eggs thinking "If people are having trouble with their poached eggs not being cooked through then the obvious answer is to add more water so that they cook longer, right?". WRONG! Oh they looked great from the top but I started pulling them out and they were nowhere near cooked on the bottom. About a third of the egg was still raw on the bottom.
At that point I was just happy that it perfectly hard-boiled my eggs without making a huge mess and that I didn't have the expense of a funeral for the egg cooker that could have been.
A few weeks have gone by now and I am loving my Egg Central. I've perfectly hard boiled dozens of eggs and we love them. Still hadn't tried cooking them any other way again until this morning while I was loading the cooker for hard-boiled eggs again and I accidentally crunched one's shell so badly that I didn't think it would be a good idea to put it in to hard-boil. So I decided to try poaching again.
I sprayed the poaching tray with a little olive oil but this time I filled the beaker to the level for hard-boiling just to see what happened. When the beeper sounded I took the lid off and they appeared to be cooked, but I'd obviously been fooled once before. So I got a fork and carefully started pulling the edges away from the tray and it looked like they were cooked all the way through this time. So I pulled all of the edges away from the sides of the tray and pulled them out on to a plate. They were all PERFECT! Completely and perfectly cooked all the way through!
VERY IMPORTANT: If you have hard water even filtered water will leave a residue in the base after the eggs are cooked. At first I tried a wet paper towel to scrub it out. Then I tried a cleaner and nothing worked. I finally as suggested poured a little water and a little white vinegar and as soon as I poured the vinegar in the stuff on the bottom began lifting off of the bottom. I let it set for a few minutes and using my finger and a paper towel wipe the bottom and then pour the water/vinegar out into the sink. Wipe dry and it looks like I just took it out of the box.
So after this very long review I can say that I was very disappointed at first with the performance of the Cuisinart Egg Central but after a little tweaking and learning how to use it properly I am more than happy with it and have decided to purchase more as gifts for others I know who love eggs.
