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I’ll just say it: Boiling eggs is so boring.
I used to stand over my stove, gazing at my pot in a trance, occasionally glancing at my phone as the seconds slowly dropped down on the seven-minute timer I set for perfectly jammy eggs. You know how a watched pot never boils? A watched egg never soft-boils either. I’d try to make the most of the time. I'd boil a bunch of eggs in batches so it was a weekly one-and-done. I’d even listen to music—my perfect egg takes the time equivalent of two Olivia Rodrigo songs in case you’re wondering—really anything to pass the seven minutes that dragged around the clock.
But then a small creature came along to save me from my kitchen monotony—sort of like in Ratatouille, but thankfully not a rat. (Maybe I’m tempting fate here. In NYC that possibility is way too real; let’s keep the kitchen rats animated, please!) Okay, it’s not a creature exactly, but rather a tool that looks like one: this NobleEgg Egg Timer Pro.
Nothing about this timer is conventional or boring. You don’t track seconds or wait for an alarm to go off. In fact, it’s not a clock at all, but rather works through heat-sensitive color change.
Throw the timer in a pot of room-temperature water with your desired quantity of eggs and bring the water to a boil. The belly of the gadget will start completely red and incrementally change to white, starting at the outside and working inward. A set of concentric rings mark which stage the egg is at: soft, medium, or hard boiled. Once you see that your preferred level of doneness has been achieved and the ring you’re looking for has turned white, remove the eggs. Yes, you have to glance into the pot to see if your eggs are done, but this thing makes hovering over boiling water kind of fun.
To recalibrate the timer, simply rinse it under water (I generally use room-temp) and then let it dry. The egg will soon return to its original red.
And now for the elephant in the room...or chick in the pot? The NobleEgg timer looks like a character straight out of the animated series Tuca and Bertie; it even has those classic sparkling cartoon eyes. This may make it hard to take this thing seriously, but you absolutely should. The NobleEgg knows its stuff.
Even in this hyper-digital age, peering into the soul of an egg through its opaque shell remains unfeasible. But with this timer (I named mine the Egg Whisperer), gooey yolks will runneth over your English muffins and bowls of rice—and you’ll have a little friend to keep you company, making those seven excruciating minutes in the morning a lot more cheerful.
