3 Best Egg Cookers
We tried a Dash cooker and six other models to see which made the best boiled and poached eggs. Plus, we used an air fryer and the stovetop method to compare cooking times.
When you shop through retailer links on our site, we may earn affiliate commissions. 100% of the fees we collect are used to support our nonprofit mission. Learn more.
Eggs are grocery store superstars—chock-full of nutrients like protein, choline, and vitamin D and able to stand on their own or be incorporated into great recipes like quiche, deviled eggs, chili, and ramen dishes. So it’s not surprising that egg cookers are a popular kitchen tool for whipping up more eggs in less time.
- Everything Egg Cookers: Our Winner A Poached Egg Fail Egg-Safety Issues Cook Times for Each Model How We Evaluated Egg Cookers
This compact, cute-as-a-button egg cooker can make up to seven soft-boiled, medium-boiled, and hard-boiled eggs at one time, plus it comes with a poach tray with two slots and an omelet tray that doubles as a tray for steaming one to two servings of vegetables. This egg cooker didn’t take up a lot of space on my counter and using it was as simple as filling the heating tray with the appropriate amount of water for soft or poached eggs, plugging it in, and pressing a button to start (a red indicator light appears when it’s on).
Measuring cup: All of the egg cookers we evaluated came with a measuring cup, and the Hamilton Beach measuring cup was both my favorite and my least favorite for a few different reasons. I love how it has two sides with individual markings in legible dark black print (some others are difficult to read) for 1 to 7 eggs. The only other egg cooker we tried that has markings for the different number of eggs you are making is the Presto Easy Store Electric Egg Cooker, and I’m not sure why this feature is lacking on others because it seems obvious you’ll need more or less water depending on the number of eggs you cook.
Piercer and a safety concern: Like the other measuring cups, this one also has a built-in egg piercer at the bottom. The egg cooker manuals for some models suggest piercing your eggs before boiling them. Here’s where we have to stop and provide a caveat because nothing about cooking eggs isn’t without some controversy. Piercing your egg can make it easier to peel it after it has been cooked, but it may also introduce bacteria into your egg, especially if your piercer or needle isn’t sterile. With that said, James E. Rogers, PhD, director of food safety research and testing at CR, says if there is bacteria on the shell, there is the chance that you are introducing bacteria into the raw egg prior to cooking, but having the egg reach 160° F during cooking should kill any pathogens that were introduced.
Soft-boiled: It took about 7 minutes to cook one soft-boiled egg (compared with 8 minutes in an air fryer), and the result was a perfectly solid white portion with a slightly runny yolk (some of the yolk was hardened). Solid results.
Poached: One poached egg took about 7 minutes to cook, compared with 11 minutes on the stovetop. The egg white was cooked nicely, but the yolk was medium cooked with only a slight runniness and not up to my poached egg standards. If its poaching feature were a student, we’d give it a B-plus.
Cleaning: This was one of two egg cookers (the other was the Elite Gourmet Automatic Easy Egg Cooker) in which you could see water bubbling up through the egg tray when it cooked, which led to a slightly messier aftermath. I washed the cooking trays with warm, soapy water and this instantly removed greasy residue. As per its instructions, I added a little white vinegar to the heating tray to remove mineral deposits and it cleaned up easily, as well.
Dishwasher-safe: Poaching tray and egg holder are dishwasher-safe.
Warranty: 5-year limited
If you’re having guests over or like to make big breakfasts on the weekend, this is the egg cooker that will slash the time it takes to make up to 10 eggs (soft-, medium-, or hard-boiled) at once, and it’s the only egg cooker we evaluated that has a poaching tray with slots for four poached eggs (it also comes with an omelet tray).
Measuring cup: One con was that its measuring cup is a little confusing to figure out—it has separate markings for soft, medium, hard, poached eggs, and omelets, as well as for 1 to 10, 1 to 4, or 1 to 3 eggs, and it isn’t easily evident which markings are for which cooking style. In order to cook 10 eggs, you’ll have to stack a smaller tray on top of the larger egg tray that holds seven eggs, but this is a breeze to do and it adds only a little more than an inch of height to your cooker (if counter space is a concern).
The stainless steel dome lid is unique in that it isn’t plastic. The trade-off is that you can’t see your eggs cooking, if that’s important to you. Instead of pushing a button to turn it on, it has an on/off switch and a light indicator.
Soft-boiled: It took 4 minutes, 27 seconds to cook one soft-boiled egg (about 4 minutes less than it took in the air fryer), and the result was a runny egg with a bit more runny white than I would have liked, but overall I’d give it a B-plus.
Poached: One poached egg took 8 minutes, 15 seconds (3 minutes less than on the stovetop), and I was pleasantly surprised by its lovely runny yolk and mostly solid white part. It was hard to get out of the tray, though—make sure you apply an abundant amount of cooking spray beforehand because my egg got stuck. A-minus for the poached egg; C-minus for the time it took to clean the poach tray.
Cleaning: I used a little white vinegar on the heating tray to combat some mineral discoloration and a lot of elbow grease to scrub the poaching tray, with its smaller slots and tighter crevices. You can wash the trays in hot, soapy water or in the top rack of your dishwasher.
Dishwasher-safe: Removable parts are dishwasher-safe.
Warranty: 3-year limited
The Presto Easy Store Electric Egg Cooker took the longest to make one soft-boiled and one poached egg and was more on a par with the cooking times in the air fryer and on the stovetop, but it gets a coveted spot in our top three favorites because of some of its great features and egg cooking outcomes.
The egg tray stands out because it has six smaller, round holes for medium or large eggs and wider holes for up to six extra-large eggs, though you’ll have to lay them on their sides to cook. This is the only cooker that accounts for different egg sizes, though I used extra-large eggs throughout my evaluation and never had an issue fitting them in any of the other cookers. One con is that it lacks an omelet tray.
Soft-boiled: Let’s start with how well it cooked. Our soft-boiled egg took 8 minutes, 47 seconds to cook (47 seconds more than the air fryer) and produced a similar egg with a slightly overcooked yolk that resembled a medium-boiled egg. Note: The manual says it should take between 11 to 14 minutes to cook a soft-boiled egg, but given how my egg was overcooked at nearly 9 minutes (and all of the water had evaporated during the cooking process), I don’t see how this time would have been accurate.
Poached: The poached tray features two slots. One poached egg cooked in 8 minutes, 30 seconds—3½ minutes faster than the stovetop—and here’s where this machine excelled: The egg white was solid and smooth, and the yolk had some runniness happening, though I still prefer it runnier. It didn’t beat my stovetop version, but it was the best poached egg to emerge from any of the cookers.
Measuring cup: I liked the measuring cup because it provided measurement markings for soft, medium, hard-boiled, and poached eggs, but it’s double-sided: One side features markings for 1 to 3 eggs, while the other side has markings for 4 to 6 eggs.
I didn’t love the rectangular plastic lid because it doesn’t securely latch to the heating tray, but you can place the egg tray and lid, minus the heating plate, in your fridge to store your eggs.
Cleaning: The egg tray, poaching tray, and measuring cup are top-rack dishwasher-safe; the lid should be hand-washed. Mineral deposits already formed on the water reservoir after the first time I used it, but I followed the manufacturer’s instructions and cleaned it with ½ cup of white vinegar and ½ cup of water, then plugged in the unit and let it heat up for 10 minutes before wiping it clean. Will this become an annoying process to repeat over time? Possibly. I think your level of annoyance over its maintenance needs will depend on how much you crave faster poached eggs.
Dishwasher-safe: Cooking tray, poaching tray, and measuring cup are dishwasher-safe.
Warranty: 1-year limited
Other Egg Cookers We Evaluated
Results were mixed when it came to the other egg cookers that we evaluated. Some were the fastest we tried but didn’t cook our eggs well, while others weren’t easy to clean.
Dash was always the brand that came to mind when I thought about egg cookers. As far as appearances go, this egg cooker didn’t disappoint: Similar to the Hamilton Beach 3-in-1 Egg Cooker, it is compact and cute but can cook one less egg in its egg tray, so we had to deduct an imaginary point for that detail. Its poaching tray fits two eggs, and it comes with an omelet tray.
Soft-boiled: The Dash speedily cooked one soft-boiled egg in 4 minutes, 30 seconds, which saved almost 4 minutes from the time it took in my air fryer. But the quality of my egg was nowhere near air-fryer quality: The yolk and a good amount of white in the egg was still runny—in fact, the two merged into one another. Eggs-actly what you don’t want.
One instruction in its manual confused me: One soft-boiled egg should take 10 minutes to cook, according to the manual, but the problem is that I added the appropriate amount of water indicated on the measuring cup, so allowing the egg to keep cooking for an additional 5 minutes without water seems potentially dangerous. The manual also says “extra large or jumbo eggs may require additional water and time to achieve desired results,” so it’s possible some of these egg cookers require trial and error to figure out the best ratio of water to egg.
Poached: This was fast, too—it took 5 minutes, 19 seconds, shaving nearly 6 minutes from the time it took to poach one egg on my stovetop. But, again, there was no comparison: When I broke into the egg, I saw liquid white as well as liquid yolk. It was too soft and lacked shape. To compare how the Dash made a poached egg with a poached egg I made on my stovetop, here are the results from both:
Photo: Lisa Fogarty/Consumer Reports Photo: Lisa Fogarty/Consumer Reports
Cleaning: Soapy warm water and a little white vinegar removed mineral deposits on the heating tray.
Dishwasher-safe: Non-electric parts are dishwasher-safe.
Warranty: 1-year limited
Another cutie that underperformed, the Nostalgia Retro Premium 7-Egg Cooker is an economical pick from Walmart that makes up to seven soft-, medium-, hard-boiled, and poached eggs, as well as omelets. Perhaps because it’s the cheapest egg cooker on this list, one egg tray served both as a poacher (which fits just one egg) and omelet maker, and the manufacturer says that it also can be used to steam vegetables and make dumplings. It comes with an egg-white separator though, which is a nice touch. Sounds like a great economical purchase so far, but how does it cook?
Soft-boiled: It did pretty well with our soft-boiled egg, cooking in 5 minutes, 32 seconds, saving us about 2½ minutes and delivering an egg with a semi-soft yolk (not very runny) and well-cooked egg white. According to the manual, cooking large eggs to a soft boil should take 10 minutes, but as I kept discovering, there is a discrepancy between what many of the manuals suggest and the time the machine actually takes to cook.
Poached: Its poached egg was a bit disastrous. It cooked fast—in 5 minutes, 18 seconds (nearly 6 minutes faster than the stovetop), but it had an oily residue on the bottom and top of the egg, and while the white portion cooked well, the yolk was overdone.
Cleaning: I didn’t find this cooker easy to clean by hand. Some egg spilled on the heating plate during cooking, and even after I used white vinegar and water to clean it, it stayed stuck on a bit.
Dishwasher-safe: No
Warranty: 1 year
The Chefman Electric Egg Cooker is the second fastest (for soft-boiled eggs) and the tallest cooker on our list (something to keep in mind when judging how much counter space you’ll need), and it has some solid features. It also came very close to being our top choice for best poached eggs, but the little bit of liquid white egg swimming in the yolk was its ultimate downfall.
Soft-boiled: This pick cooked a soft-boiled egg in 4 minutes, 22 seconds (about 4 minutes faster than the air fryer) and the yolk was medium-soft in most places, a little runny in others—however, some liquid white remained in the shell and that’s going to be a “no” for us.
Poached: It poached one egg in its two-slot egg poacher in exactly 5 minutes, and the results were better: The egg white was cooked well and draped nicely over the yolk, and the runny yolk broke beautifully with a fork. I wasn’t enamored with its loud, annoying beep that went off when the eggs were finished cooking, but this is a minor flaw.
Cleaning: All of the parts (except for the base) are dishwasher-safe, and the base was easily cleaned with white vinegar and water.
Dishwasher-safe: Lid, cooking, and poaching trays are dishwasher-safe.
Warranty: 1-year limited
Soft-boiled: The Elite Gourmet Automatic Easy Egg Cooker was the fastest model when cooking soft-boiled eggs: It took just 4 minutes, 20 seconds to boil one egg, which was nearly 4 minutes faster than the air fryer. That’s where our praise ends: The yolk was runny and the egg white was extremely runny. The manual suggests that it should take 7 to 11 minutes to make soft-boiled eggs and that more time may be required for extra large and jumbo eggs, but no additional tips are offered for how much more water and time to add. With the accurate amount of water added, the timer went off much sooner than 7 to 11 minutes.
Poached: While it poached one egg in just 5 minutes, 12 seconds (about 6 minutes faster than on the stovetop), the outcome was a mess: Liquid white egg bled into the runny yolk, and the entire thing looked like a flattened flying saucer.
Cleaning: A few things we liked about this cooker include that it comes in five colors, looks good on your counter, and although water bubbled up through the egg tray and the parts got a bit dirty and sticky, it was fairly easy to clean with soapy water. But it just didn’t do it for us in terms of how well it cooked.
Dishwasher-safe: No
Warranty: 2-year limited
Egg-Safety Issues
Eggs are the opera divas of the food world—they’re high maintenance (but worth it). They should be cooked well to avoid salmonella, which is a bacteria that can cause foodborne illness, and your food preparation space should be cleaned before cooking them.
“First make sure you wash your hands and the countertop, etc., before and after preparation,” Rogers says. “Consumers preparing eggs should make sure that egg, white and yolk, are solid (no runny yolks). It is understood that some people like runny eggs, but to reduce your risk, the advice would be to cook your eggs to solid.”
The only exception would be if you insist on preparing and consuming raw eggs, such as in a Caesar salad, that the egg products you use are pasteurized or treated in a proven manner to prevent the consumption of salmonella, Rogers says. “In a situation where you can control temperatures, such as in a casserole or baked dish, the advice would be to heat the food to at least 160° F using a food thermometer to confirm,” Rogers says.
When we evaluated our seven egg cookers for temperature, all of them reached 160° F when cooking soft-boiled eggs, but three out of the seven (Chefman, Dash, and Elite Gourmet) never reached 160° F when cooking poached eggs. Regardless, according to Eric Boring, PhD, chemist at CR, you need a temperature of at least 160° F to kill salmonella, but it’s hard to tell what the minimum time would be to kill all salmonella in eggs. Five minutes would be a good educated guess for a minimum time, Boring says, but longer is always better (the caveat is that if you’re making soft-boiled eggs, you’d run the risk of overcooking them if you cook them for, say, 15 minutes). None of the egg cookers sustained a temperature of 160° F for 5 or more minutes when cooking soft-boiled or poached eggs.
If you enjoy your eggs undercooked, it’s best to follow Rogers’ advice and use pasteurized eggs and those treated to prevent salmonella.
Cook Times for Each Model
| Brand | Cook Time for One Soft-Boiled Egg | Cook Time for One Poached Egg |
| Hamilton Beach 3-in-1 Egg Cooker | 7 minutes, 9 seconds | 7 minutes, 9 seconds |
| Cuisinart Egg Central Cooker | 4 minutes, 27 seconds | 8 minutes, 15 seconds |
| Presto Easy Store Electric Egg Cooker | 8 minutes, 47 seconds | 8 minutes, 30 seconds |
| Dash Rapid Egg Cooker | 4 minutes, 30 seconds | 5 minutes, 19 seconds |
| Nostalgia Retro Premium 7-Egg Cooker | 5 minutes, 32 seconds | 5 minutes, 18 seconds |
| Chefman Electric Egg Cooker | 4 minutes, 22 seconds | 5 minutes |
| Elite Gourmet 7-Egg Automatic Easy Egg Cooker | 4 minutes, 20 seconds | 5 minutes, 12 seconds |
Plastic Concerns
All of the egg cookers we evaluated contain hard plastic parts that heat up when cooking eggs. Regarding contaminants leaching from the plastic parts during heating, Boring says it’s possible that plasticizer chemicals (like phthalates or PFAS) may be present in the plastic that can leach out. “My hunch is that chemicals may leach out from a new egg cooker, but there should be less chemicals that leach out the more the egg cooker is used,” Boring says. “Also, soft plastic is likely to leach out more chemicals than hard plastic.” Soft plastics are bendable and are often found in gaskets, seals, washers, and tubing, Boring says.
How We Evaluated Egg Cookers
We observed each cooker’s features, including its measuring cup, cooking alert sound, how much steam it produced, and how much space it took up on a kitchen counter. We cooked one soft-boiled and one poached egg in each egg cooker, using extra-large brown eggs from Trader Joe’s. Before making a soft-boiled egg, we pierced the top of the egg and inserted a food thermometer through a vented hole in the lid and into the shell to measure its temperature while it cooked. We did this to determine whether the egg reached 160° F and how long it stayed at or above that temperature.
We peeled each soft-boiled egg and observed whether it was cooked well, noting any runniness in its white part. To compare the egg cookers with an air fryer, we cooked one egg in the PowerXL Air Fryer for 8 minutes until it obtained the consistency of a well-cooked soft-boiled egg, then peeled it and observed how its final cooking result compared with the egg cookers’ soft-boiled eggs.
When making one poached egg in each egg cooker, we inserted a cooking thermometer through a vent hole in the lid and into the egg while it cooked to measure its temperature. We observed how easy it was to remove the poached egg from its tray. We broke the egg yolk with a fork and observed how well the white part and yolk were cooked. We compared the way an egg cooker cooks a poached egg with how it cooks on a stovetop, using my mother’s recipe: Boil water, add 2 tablespoons of white vinegar, lower the flame, create a vortex using a spoon, crack one egg into the water (continue to spin the water), then let it cook for 3 minutes before removing it with a slotted spoon. The entire process took 11 minutes (and the poached egg was perfection).
Finally, we then cleaned each cooker according to the manufacturer’s instructions, though we did not evaluate how well dishwasher-safe components were cleaned in the dishwasher.
