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This is Highly Recommend, a column dedicated to what people in the food industry are obsessed with eating, drinking, and buying right now.
I’m bad at boiling eggs. That’s embarrassing to admit because what I’m saying is that I’m bad at timers. Our recipe for jammy eggs is fewer than 100 words, and a lot of those words are about putting a pot of water on the stove. The only real step is waiting patiently for 6½ minutes, but still, I pull my eggs from the ice bath only to find chalky yolks or unset whites and—when I return to the dining room—a group of friends who expected much more out of ramen night.
Sure, my colleagues in the test kitchen make boiled eggs out to be a science, but they did not consider that I am bad at science. But that’s okay! Just because one aspect of cooking (even a really, really easy aspect of cooking) eludes me, it doesn’t make me a bad chef. It just means I need some help—and for me, that help comes from a little machine called the Dash Rapid Egg Cooker.
The Dash is a mini steamer, and it’s as simple an appliance as can be. It has one button that might as well just say EGGS, and for less than $20, it allows even the most timer-averse cook to attain jammy perfection every single time. To use it, just add water to the reservoir, place up to six eggs on the tray, cover, and press the button. A few minutes later, the Dash will sing a song to let you know it’s (literally) out of steam, and voilà—perfect boiled eggs. No tricks, no secrets, no science, that’s the whole thing.
I know single-use appliances can be a tough sell, but this one is smaller than a lot of my food storage containers. It’s also freaking adorable—an essential quality in any niche kitchen tool—available in a whole slate of pretty pastel colors and shaped like a twee UFO from planet Egg. Above all else, it’s just so easy to use. You adjust the firmness of your yolks by tweaking the amount of water you add with an included measuring cup, which has labels for Soft, Medium, and Hard. I’ve found that by slightly under-filling the cup, I can skip the ice bath entirely and let the eggs cool inside the Dash, which means no more empty ice trays at cocktail hour.
In my kitchen, the Dash Rapid Egg Cooker has turned boiled eggs into the no-stress topping and ingredient I’ve always wanted them to be. I can turn it on when I start making instant noodles for a more filling snack. I can make potluck-ready quantities of deviled eggs without throwing away a shameful amount of duds. Most important, it lets me focus on the parts of cooking I’m good at—and the parts that actually interest me—and that’s the kind of convenience I’m willing to pay for.
